The Living Room - Post 3

In case anyone is wondering, I'm dropping the "Day" count because I'm not working on this every day.

I'm almost finished removing flooring in the entry up to the center beam of the house. It actually extends a bit into the former eat in dining room-now kitchen area which is fine by me. The hardest part so far has been removing the two layers of plywood, but now that they're all up removing additional flooring won't be a problem at all.

This is what the reverse side of the top layer of plywood looks like. The top part was closest to the exterior wall where moisture wasn't an issue. In a few short feet you go from nearly dry to soaked. Everything I've removed has been dry - this is entirely the result of water condensing in the insulation and the wood transferring the moisture back up. 

This is the largest piece of the original subfloor that I was able to expose - elsewhere it crumbled into nothing when the second layer came up. It's nowhere near strong enough for anything to stand on it. Even the cat would've fallen through.

Once I reached the kitchen area I came across some SWEET linoleum from the 1970s under the tile. The scary thing about it is, the color scheme with the flooring, lighting, countertops and the fact that the cabinets were wood colored at the time actually makes sense. 30 years ago the place probably looked pretty good. This is where things became easy, because the thinset under the backer board doesn't bond at all to a flexible material like linoleum. As long as no one falls through, it looks like removing the flooring in the kitchen will almost be fun.

Underneath the linoleum is nothing - just old subfloor. There are no outlines of asbestos tile, so whatever sheet flooring was there originally is gone now.

Here is what it looks like now. The cat is probably somewhere in the crawlspace again, but Snowy has no desire to jump down there. My plan for this weekend is to pull subflooring up to the center beam, then dig the footings for however many piers need to go in under the bedrooms. If I'm lucky they'll be poured and then I can think about how I'm going to remove the hardwood in the living room.