Watch Old Vinyl Floors Disappear

     The workers had a big job ahead ripping out the old flooring in the kitchen/dining area.  Layers of vinyl, staples by the thousands, and messy tar paper to scape off.  It kept them busy for two days.

Step one:

Ben begins to remove the top layer.  This sheet vinyl flooring was installed in 2000.
Notice I have put down a green and a cloth protective tarp over the newly sanded oak floors. Certainly did not want stuff getting ground into those newly refinished floors. 

The white flooring came up fast and then the fun would begin.  (Not)

 
Step Two:
Under the first layer of flooring was a thin wood sub floor.  When the people installed this they used an automatic staple gun and PLASTERED this whole floor repeatedly with staples. It was truly unbelievable!  They must have won the lottery on a year's worth of free staples and put every single box full of them on this floor.  They set the trigger to auto, pulled the trigger once and never let up on driving staples in the wood.

Where the vinyl had a seam there were hundreds more staples. Who ever did this job certainly did not want that gold vinyl to lift up!

 Staples not just on these strips, but click on the photo and you can see them sticking up everywhere.

 Tony using a 'claw' and continues the tedious job of removing staples.

Paul and I spent about 5 hours on the floor that evening.  We wanted to help this along so that when they returned in the morning they would have that many less staples to pull out.

 Finally!  All the staples have been removed and they can release the old gold flooring.
  And under all this was the icky tar paper.  Another challenge lay ahead of them.

 Read  Step Three-Four under the archive title " A Mess of Tar Paper & New Sub Floor"