Floor Sammich

So you're thinking of painting your wood floors.

You've spent hours on Pinterest, picking and choosing color and design possibilities.

Your lovely blog readers have endorsed your idea wholeheartedly (thanks, btw) and you're just about ready to go grab your flat bar and get to pryin' but something stops you.

What are you getting yourself into, you wonder. You don't even know if the wood under the vinyl is worth uncovering. Then you remember that time when you didn't have any heat and those nice guys had to come and install a couple of furnaces.

Turns out, they sawed through that very kitchen floor so they could put vents in it. And your awesome husband, who was home when they did it (and consequently burned up their saw blades and had to leave for the day), asked them if he could keep a piece of the floor because...frankly, it has to be seen to be believed.

Feast your eyes on the floor sammich, y'all.

So yeah, enough of this third person nonsense.

I remembered that Conan had kept a piece of the floor to show me and it was still in the basement because...you never know when you might need a chunk of your floor, okay?

And there it is in all of it's glory.

Let's put on our safety goggles and disect it, shall we class?

Okay, so layer one.

You got your basic, textured vinyl rug layed down. Impossible to clean as illustrated by that picture.

It's stuck to a piece of louon which is turn, stapled to a...

...nother piece of louon (1/4" plywood).

About, oh...40 years or so beneath that you've got this lovely piece of linoleum.

And then, under that you have

 Actual wood!

Filled with staples.

Whatever, that last part's not important. What's important is wood! Yay wood!

Aside from the staples you can see some gunk on there that might be some sort of adhesive or it might be an old finish that's flaking off.

It's really pretty nice.

Note the tongue and grooviness (sorry, couldn't resist).

Well, I say it's pretty nice but who knows what it looks like when you pull up the whole rug. There could be a patched hole in the middle of the floor. But for now at least, I feel a little reassured knowing that there might be something under there worth uncovering.

My only tiny worry is that. Well, that's a lot of floor there. If/when we take it all up, we're losing like a good inch or so of floor depth which could mean some "creative carpentry" when it comes to thresholds, beneath the cabinets, etc. But I suppose we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Or rather, we'll build that bridge as we cross it. That's more our style. Remodel first, think later.

Stay tuned. If the mood strikes me I might just grab that aforementioned flat bar and start pryin' away sometime real soon.