Group Therapy or Kitchen Floor Demolition

Well y'all, my kitchen floor is laying in the driveway. That can only mean one thing.

For my birthday, I got to do a little dem-o-lition! We got to do a little demolition, I should say. Or as my dad likes to put it, "Group therapy".

We started by pulling up the louon that the black and white rug up there was attached to. Took about thirty minutes. Deceptively easy.

You can see from the above picture that there is another layer of louon beneath that.

Conan took the day off to hang out with me on my big day and look what I made him do, manual labor!

Next came the layer underneath that which, if you noticed is FULL of staples. I mean FULL. This made it impossible to pull up in big chunks like the previous layer. Instead, Conan and my dad just broke it to bits using flat bars and hammers.

They made quick work of it, considering. I lost a little of my wallpapered stairs during the demolition. I think it was when Conan was taking the base shoe off so we could re-use it. Smart guy, that Conan. 

Now if you're feeling extra perceptive today you may have also noticed (in addition to the insane amount of staples) that there are two different floors underneath that layer.

Part of the floor has that awesome orange-ish rug on it, the other part has some old timey linoleum which Conan joked that was probably sold to the homeowners by saying something like "It's so easy to clean and it looks JUST like wood flooring!" *eyeroll* Yeah, totally. Just like wood.

The brown stuff continues under the orange-ish stuff, too. I scraped a little of the brown stuff off just to see what we were working with. It looks exactly like the flooring in the rest of the house. It matches up perfectly with the wood floor in the hall.

The four of us, my mom, my dad, Conan and myself spent the next hour or so pulling staples out of the orange-ish stuff with all manner of tools. Basically, whatever would get them out was fair game. Screwdrivers, pliers, side cutters, etc.

Unfortunately, even all of that diligent work still left us with about a zillion staples. As well as a zillion theories as to why anyone would use that many staples.

A) First time using a staple gun (it is very fun)

B) A lil' too much Miller time = "I can't remember if I stapled there, better staple again just to be sure."

C) "Hey, I'm never takin' this stuff up! Staple away!"

Basically, this is what we're left with right now.

Shorty was feeling mighty photogenic today so I let him do a little "walk, walk, fashion baby".

I mean, aside from being hideously ugly, it's not really that bad. I kind of like how the yellow looks with the chalkboard fridge and it makes the black counters and white cabinets stand out. I'm totally tearing it up though. Totally.

But first, I have to go pull a few more staples. I've read a little about using a heat gun to get this stuff to come up easier. Anybody ever tried that?

Welp, I'm off to pull some more staples. Ugh! Wish us luck!