Kitchen Project

Week 2

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Emboldened by my ability to follow directions, Amy got more daring and gave me significant new tasks, which involved tearing out the cabinet above the fridge and continue the de-paneling and de-plastering all the way back into the niche where the fridge stays. She also decided that while the kitchen was a wreck, i might as well tear up the floor.

I learned a good lesson from the previous plaster removal. A dust-tight seal means that the whole house will not be filled with plaster dust. I tore out the cabinets and exposed the brick over a period of two days. Wire-brushing left me looking like some sort of strange sand person.

...

Nikki Cohen came over to help with the wire brushing. She wire-brushed herself grey hair. Behind the dust-lock the wall is coming along nicely. The dustman commeth.

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And how cool is this? Sculptor Maria Nevelson turned my kitchen cabinet remnants into a diptych. Those nasty old doors will live on in a museum.

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Amy came back over the weekend and while I finished up shop vacuuming the wall, she started on the tile. Initially the floor wasn't as good as I'd hoped but still better than we'd expected. A lot of sanding in the future. We switched jobs every 15 minutes to keep from getting bored or blistered.

...

By Saturday morning all the tile had been scraped off of the floor and Amy and I went to rent a drum sander from Home Depot. The Very Helpful Guy in rentals told me that I couldn't sand with adhesive down on the floor. I had to strip the floor first. I asked him if he'd stripped his floor. He said no, he tiled over it instead. So, anyway, I bought a gallon of some stuff called Klean Strip Adhesive Remover. You plop it down on the floor with a paint brush, wait half an hour, then scrape it off. It was nasty work and it didn't get all the bits of tar-paper that were the backing of the original tile, but the floor stopped being sticky. Previously, it had the power to rip off a poorly tied shoe and leave you with one foot firmly affixed to the floor and the other dangling, stocking clad, in the air above.


Underneath the tile in the kitchen the floor looked okay. Obviously the laundry room floor had been unfinished while the kitchen floor had been finished at one time.	Twelve hours with a bucket, some acid jelly and scrapers later ....	Helena helped scrape the floor and make sure the cats didn't run across it, which they desperately wanted to do. "Acid on the floor? I must walk there! Meow!"

Nine trash bags of floor tile and one bag of glue and goo and buckets and scrapers and implements of destruction.
The trash men love me.

[back to the kitchen]
[back to week one]
[onwards to week three]
[to my homepage]


I learned a good lesson from the previous plaster removal. A dust-tight seal means that the whole house will not be filled with plaster dust.	I tore out the cabinets and exposed the brick over a period of two days.	Wire-brushing left me looking like some sort of strange sand person.


Nikki Cohen came over to help with the wire brushing. She wire-brushed herself grey hair.	Behind the dust-lock the wall is coming along nicely.	The dustman commeth.


Amy came back over the weekend and while I finished up shop vacuuming the wall, she started on the tile.	Initially the floor wasn't as good as I'd hoped but still better than we'd expected. A lot of sanding in the future.	We switched jobs every 15 minutes to keep from getting bored or blistered.