Our Kitchen Floor Demolition has Begun

For almost the past two years, my wife and I have been working on renovating the house we bought in foreclosure.  It is a decent house with a lot of potential, but is horribly outdated.  The back hallway has wood paneling on the walls, the stove that came with the house sparked when you turned it on (and even included visible fire damage to the overheard microwave and ceiling), the dishwasher leaked, the house was covered in a hideous red carpet, and there was visible damage throughout the house (nothing major, but a bunch of little things).  Since we moved into the house in December 2011, the house is looking significantly better, though there is still a lot of work remaining.

Replacing a Linoleum Kitchen Floor

One of the big projects we have been looking to get done is replacing the ugly and worn linoleum flooring in the kitchen with tile.  We have been meaning to do it for months now, since we knew our son would soon be mobile and is going to want to walk around downstairs.  Well, he is mobile now, and is probably going to be walking before we know it, so on a bit of a whim, my wife decided Friday was the day we would start working on tearing up the floor instead of cleaning which was originally on the agenda (to be fair, I had already cut up the linoleum and underlayment into one foot squares a few days before, so the project was going to happen sooner rather than later).  Before I really knew what was happening, she was on the kitchen floor, prying up some of the floor squares.  No going back now.

For those who know my wife, she has a tendency to get suddenly inspired to complete a project, and when she does, she will do it, physics be damned.  I have heard a story of her raising her entire bed above her head in college in order to put it up on stands, because she needed it higher and didn't want to bother anyone, though this is before my time, so only a couple of her college friends can corroborate it.  Needless to say, I saw no point in arguing with her, and proceeded to help tear up the floor.

This is the blade I
used to cut the
flooring.

Removing Linoleum Floor the Easy Way

We are still in phase one of the project.  The center of the floor came up with no issues since it was cut up, but the areas under the pantry and by the cabinets is still left.  We have three layers of linoleum in the kitchen from over the years, totaling well over an inch of floor.  If you are ever in a similar situation trying to tear up a linoleum floor, I highly recommend cutting it into squares before ripping it out.  not only did it make the project easier, just my wife and I were able to get the bulk of the floor removed in a matter of a few hours.  Without doing that first, we would still be ripping up the floor today.


For anyone interested, this is definitely one of those situations where you need the right tool for the job.  I have a fairly cheap corded circular saw, and figured I would try using that to cut up the floor.  As it turns out, it was not as easy as I thought it would be.  After an hour of cutting, I made it about two thirds of the way through the first of maybe two dozen cuts, and managed to heat up the blade enough to warp it.  After a trip to Lowes, we picked up a carbide-tipped framing blade, and got the rest of the cutting done in about half an hour.

I have included pictures below of our progress.  Hopefully I will be able to post pictures of our new tile floor in the next couple weeks.

This is the old linoleum with the one foot square cuts already made.  We probably could have made
the squares a bit larger, but this size makes removal and disposal quite easy.  The largest mess was
all the sawdust from cutting the lines.

When we started ripping up the floor, the first two layers of linoleum came up with no issues.  The
original layer was pretty easy too once we actually got a tile out from that layer.  The first layer was
on three quarters inch particleboard, so getting under the tile took a little effort, but once the first
one was out, we flew through the rest.

The first layer of linoleum was in pretty crappy shape, but the sub-floor is still looking alright.  The
second layer of linoleum is actually the ugliest in our opinion, but I don't have any pictures of it.

Clean up was really easy, as most of the debris came up in tiles that could just be carried out.  There
was only a little bit of remaining debris that needed to be swept up.  This probably saved us hours of
cleaning, which was really nice since we have a baby and a dog and two cats that love to get into stuff.

The bulk of the floor came up in about three or four hours, but since the circular saw doesn't cut all th
 way to the wall, we had to do some more old-fashioned demo work to get the floor by the walls out.
Having the middle already removed made that easier too, though.

As you can see from the debris pile, the work along the walls did not produce the clean squares that we had
for most of the work, but there was not that much debris, so removing it was still pretty simple.