Our weekend floored us

No, I haven't stitched all weekend. *whine*

Our den floor plans prior to this weekend were to caulk all the cracks between the den floor boards as a temporary one to two year fix (eventually, we'll replace the old floor with a new engineered wood floor). In preparation for this, I spent two days meticulously vacuuming crud from between the boards and then scrubbing the boards clean with a scrubber sponge and soapy water. The floor looked nice.

Then, we figured out two things: 1) prepping for caulking and doing the caulking would take us about 30-40 hours of time (ACK!), and 2) even with the caulk in the cracks, to keep the unfinished boards looking nice, I would have to scrub them at least every other week. Scrubbing them took me a total of six hours. I ain't gonna do this every two weeks. I like a clean floor, but I'm all about ease of keeping it clean and cleaning it easily.

So we put on our thinking caps. We decided to buy cheap vinyl flooring to glue down . Easy to clean, easy on the budget, and it would cover the cracks. Off we went to Surplus Warehouse for cheap flooring.

Then DH got to thinking again. We wanted to reuse the old floor boards and gluing vinyl down on them would make this very difficult. DH decided it would be best to remove all the old boards and underlayment, assess the sub floor, add a new sub floor as needed, and then glue down the vinyl. (One nice thing about that nasty polyurethane glue used to glue down engineered wood flooring, it will stick to vinyl so we wouldn't have to pull up the vinyl floor before putting down the new wood floor in the future!).

So that's what we did. Here is DH wrestling the old screws out of the boards before pulling them up.

The black stuff under the boards is tar paper. And see all that dirt and crud left behind after my meticulous vacuuming? YUCK!

Next, DH rolled up the tar paper.

We found a weirdly floor underneath. It was half painted plywood flooring and then half plywood and OSB over unpainted boards. We think the part with the plywood/OSB was at one time a porch floor.

We also found evidence of a previous owner, or at least painting helper.

So we covered the entire weirdly floor with a layer of new OSB. DH fitted it and I screwed it down. We ran out of daylight and energy, so we stopped here. Tonight, we will glue down the vinyl; a picture tomorrow.

Then, I will FINALLY be able to move in my furniture!