Week 4 - Kitchen / Stair Remodel

My parents came up again this weekend to celebrate my birthday and help us out a bit with the house. Even with their help, the pace of the project has slowed to a crawl. I've moved off of the floor scraping and onto the trim and baseboards. So far everything I've worked on on this project has involved kneeling, scraping, and scrubbing.



Chris and my dad did some more clean up on the kitchen ceiling and pulled out the stove vent and some of the abandoned ductwork. In one of the remodels past they cut off the cold air return to the upstairs kitchen with the new window but left the duct in place. Nothing like having a hole in the wall for no reason.

Last night, Chris started work on the wallpaper again, it looks like he's gotten over his fear of tigers :)

Even though we are still in a state of destruction. It does help to think of putting it all back together, we're thinking about amber shellac for color on the kitchen floor with a water based polyurethane over top to protect it from moisture and scratches. I think our floors were originally waxed but I'm afraid that we won't be able to keep up with that. I'm going to try to get the pantry floor sanded so we can use it as a test to test our finishing options.

Stressing out once again

The stress of going to work during the day and living with the remodel is starting to get to me again. Well, it's not so much the actual remodel it's just living with the mess day in and day out. This remodel is probably one of the worst because it's impacting most of the major arteries of the house, the kitchen connects do the dining room, the stairs to upstairs, the back hall and the downstairs bathroom and since you don't want to be constantly shoving tools around the dining room has become our tool room. Some days I wish we could just live somewhere else and just come here to work, although I'm sure that has it's own challenges. So here is what I've been doing this week.

Monday night I scraped off the Citristrip after letting it sit for about 24 hours, it made a pretty good dent in the paint but I did have to apply a second time I think maybe if I glopped it on a bit thicker I would get better results, after a good scrubbing and a patch for the old outlet this piece of floor will be ready to be sanded.



I was also able to remove the rest of the vinyl on the back stairs and got a stair and a half de-fuzzed. It's much harder to work on the treads than it was to work on the rest of the floor the pine is not nearly as forgiving as the maple in the kitchen. I'm hoping I can finish up the rest of the treads tonight and get another thing checked off of the list.


Sounds like my parents or at least my dad will be up this weekend to help us out again. Our kitchen ceiling has some somewhat interesting carpentry that he and Chris may be figuring out.

Kitchen / Stairs Week 3, Days 1 -3

My informal plan for the weekend was

• Remove lino remnants from the kitchen floor and back stairs
• Strip all baseboards remaining in place
• Strip the red paint off of the floor on the north end of the kitchen
• Finish removing the wallpaper on the stairs

It's 9:15 on a Sunday night and none of the tasks are completely complete. I got off all of the lino remnants in the kitchen itself but got caught up on the stairs.


The back stairs are an interesting animal, in order to remove the vinyl from them you must first remove the metal stair tip... sounds easy enough right? Nope. The nails for the stair tread are almost impossible to pull out, they sit nearly flush and like to spin in place as you try to remove them. Then there is the removal of the sheet of plywood that they stapled onto the original stair tread with hundreds of little itsy-bitsy staples. I begin prying up the plywood and it's going pretty well at first but it gets caught up. Apparently you need to cut the linoleum at the back of the tread and take out the little piece of pine that they sandwiched into the stairs to make the vinyl fit better. So I get the pine out and am ready to pull the tread off but instead it got stuck on the ledge on the right hand side of the stars and I had to have Chris break the board in half for me in order to get it out . After that I was pretty much done for the day.

Today I got stripper onto the fire engine red paint on the floor on the north wall. I'm hoping that if I let the paint stripper sit for the full 24 hours it will take the paint right off and I won't have to screw around with it too much. A girl can dream right?

Now one might ask why bother using paint stripper at all when you're planning on sanding the floor anyways. I'd say that there is a better than average chance that there is lead in this red paint. Lead and asbestos seem to be in everything in an old house in some way shape or form. We just try to be as careful as possible without going too overboard.

Chris's Words of Wisdom: Nails and Tigers

When your using a paper tiger to scour wallpaper it's wise to remove any nails. Of course if you want to remove the skin from one of your fingers by all means leave them.

Kitchen/Stars Week 2, Day 2

Well we're done working for the day. Chris's mom and I made excellent progress on the kitchen floor. We have about half of the room scraped . And if my hands don't hurt too badly tomorrow I might just tackle the other half. For the easy spots we used just a 1 1/4 inch stiff putty knife while for the difficult areas we used hot soapy water along with a scrub brush and chisel. Early on in the project i tried to use paint stripper but it didn't work any better than the soapy water and was a pain in the ass to clean up to boot. During our work today we found an old patch to the floor, the perfectionist part of me wants to take up the boards and stagger them but the other part says it's an old house and it is what it is... I'm guessing things will stay as they are.

Kitchen/Stair End of Week 1, Beginning of Week 2

My parents and sister arrived Saturday morning to help us with the demolition and wallpaper removal. By the end of the week one, the kitchen ceiling is down, all three layers of flooring on top of the hardwood are gone, and about 90% of the wallpaper in the stairway is gone. We also were able to get down the paneling in the back hallway which is something we did not anticipate being able to get done during this project.

This weekend we have Chris's parents up from Illinois to help with the kitchen floor cleanup and some electrical wiring. We'll be seeing a lot of this this weekend. I bet you're jealous.

Kitchen/Stair Demo - End of Day 1

Today was a succesful day! Despite some inital delays we got about as much done as we'd hoped we would. Work was delayed this morning by the snow, we spent the first two hours of our work day shoveling and the snow also delayed our dumpter delivery. We didn't get down quite all the paneling today but what we did do went pretty quickly. Chris was also able to get new lightswitches installed. Then I moved onto carpet removal. I think I spent about 4 hours crouched on the stairs pulling up tackstrips and staples. I'm sore and tired but when I look at the stairs now I know it was worth it!


On an interesting sidenote my sister always says that there has been a lot of bad taste in our house over the years and we found yet another lovely example today.
Right around the lightswitch we have what looks like sponge paint, this whole time I thought it was just a bad 90's fad... Gosh was I wrong.

Well off to bed to gear up for more work tomorrow.

Gearing up for Kitchen Demo

Tomorrow we begin the major demolition of our hallway and kitchen. This is how the kitchen looked in May of 2006 on our first visitAnd here is how it looked last week
Chris and I are taking Friday, Monday, and Tuesday off of work and are having my parents up for the weekend to join in the fun. The goal for the kitchen is to have the ceiling ripped down to the joists and the floor stripped down to the hardwood.

While we have the dumpster we will also be removing the paneling on the stairs. Here's hoping for the best!