Remember When I Said "More on That Later?"

It's later.

On Sunday, we went back to the house.  The goal was to finish removing the linoleum in the kitchen. We wanted to see those original floors!  Little did we know that anxiety was just around the corner (for me anyway).

Pulling up the floors created a lot of dust, so we donned our face masks ... ridiculously uncomfortable, but necessary for breathing.

Cue the anxiety!  That, boys and girls, is a hole in our subfloor.  It's directly under where the stove was sitting.  It appears that the house was home for a period of time to some carpenter ants.  On the plus side, it seems that the damage is limited to a section of flooring at the rear of the house here.  My husband was quick to reassure me that this is easily fixable.  He has a plan.  Deep breaths ...

The process of removing layers of flooring is very time-consuming.  For that reason, it was the only thing we planned for the day.

Well, that and a little Jedi training.

And maybe taking down more of the kitchen?  Sure!  Why not?

Inside this outcropping of drywall and 2x4's is what's left of the original chimney.  The base is in the basement, but the top was destroyed years ago.  What is left here was filled with the crushed bits of the top portion.  It just stops directly beneath the second floor.  We've decided to take it out and make use of the space it's inhabiting.  For now, we just removed the front wall of the enclosure, because ... floors.  But check out that original brick.  Sexy.

Remember I mentioned tar in Saturday's post?  Well, here you can see that they apparently only used it in the kitchen.  Going into the dining room (only a tiny bit), we found that the paperboard layer is just set on top of the floor boards, which were apparently painted green.  I think it's kind of pretty.  Every day is an adventure!

And here's the not-really-a-kitchen-right-now with all of the non-original flooring removed (and some board covering the hole to keep us from stepping into it).

For funsies, I measured the distance from the original floor to the top of the linoleum tiles in the next room.  That's a 3 1/2" drop.  How crazy is that?