Update: Kitchen Floor Stripping

After a break of four months, I returned this week to scraping down the kitchen floor. If you recall, when we stripped off the 1950's linoleum, which was buckled and cracked, etched with decades of dirt and impossible to clean, we exposed stripes of black material covering the original old-growth fir floor.

(Okay, I don't know if it is old-growth fir, and in any case, it was never top-of-the-line fir, because it was the floor of a kitchen, and Craftsmen houses of 1915 didn't expend a lot of energy on the look of the kitchen, except to make it appear clean. There are lots of knotholes in this floor, one almost as big as my fist, that open direct to the basement, so it's not top-grade. But in 1915, I don't know how much non-old-growth fir was being used. There were so many trees! Cut down the big ones first, it's more efficient and economical.)

In August, I started pouring CitruStrip on the floor, leaving it covered with plastic for an hour, and then scraping it off. Then the children came home from their maternal-side vacation and I didn't want to have even this "organically toxic" stuff in the house with them. But with work on the attic on hold until the contractor is done with the upstairs closet (more about the attic in another blog entry), it occurred to me that this was something to be finished during the hours when the children are in school.

I'm now just one 5 x 2 foot stretch from a smooth floor. I believe the black material is just paper, and underneath it is linoleum glue. I'm starting to think, now that I'm almost done, that all the CitruStrip does is hold moisture against the paper long enough for the water to dissolve everything (the gel, with plastic wrap over it) -- because when I scrape off the paper, there is still a thick dark residue on the boards that I have to mop off (with lots of water and repeated cleanings). The mopping raises the grain on the wood, possibly pushing out the glue? However, no amount of wetting the black stuff and then scraping will chip it off, so even if the chemical in the gel is offering no extra help, the gel alone is worth the cost of the product. We might have been able to sand it off, but the black material would gum up the sand-paper quickly, so we would have been paying as much for sand-paper. I'm much happier with this method and then sanding only wood to get it truly smooth.

A friend pointed out that if we can keep the fir floors, the house will have more resale value than if we put in the click-together cork floor. I think that's probably true, and it might look better, too. And we have other rooms for the cork -- the basement (a bedroom, the laundry room or the yet-to-be-built multi-media room) or HomoDomi's studio, perhaps? And the contractor has commented a couple of times on the shape of the floor -- he thinks we could fix it up to look pretty wonderful.