You see, we are having new floors installed in our house
next week, partially because my wife has wanted new floors since the day we
moved in, but mostly because our Labrador retriever retrieved a bottle of blue
food coloring from the counter one afternoon and ate it on the carpet.
It looks like someone murdered a Smurf in our living room.
Half of our downstairs is carpet, and the other half is
hardwood. It’s the hardwood part that has crippled me.
You see, along with the rather large sum of money our
flooring guy quoted us for the actual installation of the new flooring, came a
slightly smaller, but still substantial amount of money quoted for removing our
existing hardwood.
He explained that we were more than welcome to remove the
old hardwood floors ourselves, but the $1600 quoted to remove them was such a
big amount in order to cover the possibility that the floors were installed
with the Devil Glue.
He explained that when you try to remove the first board
from the concrete floor, you will see one of two colors of glue underneath. If
the glue is dark brown and hard, the old boards will pop right off the concrete
like they just can’t wait to get out of the house. And if the glue is light tan
and spongy, your best bet is to sell the house and move somewhere with dark
brown glue.
I laughed. “Ha, ha,” I said, “it can’t be that bad.”
On Monday I popped up a four-inch section of the first
board, after fighting with it for about twenty minutes, to reveal the dreaded spongy
tan Devil Glue.
That wasn’t so bad, I thought to myself. And $1600
is a lot of money. I can do this.
I cannot do this. Our hardwood floors are apparently installed
to withstand a category five tornado, and a category one thousand hurricane,
combined.
If all the major and minor earthquake faults in California
triggered at once, and the entire state was ground into a fine dust by a three
bazillion magnitude quake, the only recognizable thing floating out into the
Pacific Ocean would be our entryway and kitchen floors, still joined by a short
hallway, completely unscathed by something so trivial.
Our floor guy’s advice was to use a Skil saw and actually cut
the floor into six-inch strips, perpendicular to the length of the planks. I
did that. We now have sawdust on every single square inch of the house, including
the ceiling. We have sawdust in the pockets of jackets that were hanging in the
back-bedroom closets upstairs.
Besides having six months of dusting ahead of us, and some
seriously impressive boogers, I’m not sure the sawing effort helped greatly in
any other way.
I have purchased every single prying, scraping, and
chiseling tool offered at both Home Depot and Lowe’s, and in the past day and a
half I have managed to remove about six square feet of flooring – an area
roughly the size of two kitchen chairs.
When I was able to stand mostly upright again, I even
suggested the idea to my wife of buying a Bosch handheld planer I saw at
Lowe’s, and grinding the boards off, one by one. Plus, I thought it was a great
excuse to own my own handheld planer. She politely pointed out that that was probably
my worst idea ever, since we would need to back a dump truck up to the front
door and load the resulting sawdust out of the house with snow shovels.
I told her politely that it was certainly not my worst idea
ever, since about three square feet in I was seriously considering whether I
could open some windows and adequately contain a gasoline fire that could burn
the floors off. And also grenades.
She agreed those ideas were worse.
I’ll tell you what is starting to sound more and more like a
good idea: paying our flooring guy $1600 to handle the Devil Glue. When you
think about it, that’s pretty cheap compared to the cost of the full body cast
I’m going to end up in to get the next six square feet.
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2019 Marc Schmatjen
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