The 60-year old tiles!

My husband "T" made sure that I disclose on the blog, that most of the demolition work is by him and his BFF "E".   So there!

It's true that they both put a lot of time, thoughts, and effort, without which we could not have done this much in a relatively short time, so THANKS guys!

Underneath the carpet that we removed laid the original tiles from 1950, sitting firmly (stuck) to the cement subfloor.  Here, you can see reddish-brown tiles under the mangled carpet (we were quite inexperienced in carpet rolling).

With an impulsive decision, we started scraping them away with a couple of floor scraper, one of which broke, so I had to run to a hardware store to get another one.  During my break errand run, the guys found difficulty with many, many stubborn sections.  Thankfully, being creative problem-solvers that they are, we did not give up and call the pros.  (One thing we won't do is to pay somebody to destroy our things.  We'll do it ourselves, thankyouverymuch.) 

Hammers to the rescue!

That's right, T and E ended up hammering the sh*t out of those tiles, throughout the whole house, while I scraped away what I could.  Was I concerned about the foundation being cracked?  Hell yes!  But what could I do... they needed the exercise. 

Here's one pile-o-tile from one room... and we had 4 roomfuls of similar waste. 

And the cement underneath.

Everybody slept very well that night and woke up with sore arms and chest.

Demolition DIY

The thing with DIY fixing is, once you get rid of a certain thing, be it wallpaper, flooring, etc, you invariably find other things that need to be fixed.  Soon, you end up getting rid of everything and starting from scratch!

That's exactly what we're doing (not intentionally).

The house was covered with industrial carpet.  Industrial in the truest sense of the word.... rough, heavy, ugly (gray-ish dark blue, ladies and gentlemen - the most potent color to enhance the dreariness of a house.).  It's in a pretty good condition, actually, but it has got to go!  See it for yourselves:

(gag!)

Somebody sure loved their turquoise.  And fluorescent lighting.

The turquoise wall on the other side of the room is actually painted wallpaper.  Apparently somebody didn't know care that you're not supposed to paint over wallpaper, because your buyer will absolutely hate you.  (True, I do hate whoever painted over this wallpaper).

One of the bedrooms was covered with wooden paneling on three of the walls.  Why just three, no idea.  I stopped asking questions a while back.

 (horror! How do you like the mismatched paneling?)

So we ripped off the carpet, padding, tacking throughout the house and those wall panels.  Here's the pile of rubbish to be hauled away. 

(There's more carpet in each bedroom.  The bright light is not heaven shining down... it's the skylight.)

Good riddance - we're done with demolition!  Or are we?   More to come!