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.

The Wonderful High-Pressure Water Spray-gun

One of the list items under Finish the Porch, is Stain the Ugly Concrete Stairs. They are a dirty gray-brown. Andrew thought the church had put a quick slip of cement over them just before selling the house, and has intended to get rid of the steps or at least improve them since they moved in.

Today we bought special cement stain, and borrowed a high-pressure water spray-gun from a friend. This puts out water at a rate about half of the professional spray-guns (which you can rent from Home Depot), but the friend said it was perfectly adequate for cleaning moss and dirt off steps before staining them.



It works like a charm -- pull the trigger, point and spray. And the dirt disappears as if you were spray-painting Clean all over it.

We are left now with a clean step and front walk. And the discovery that it wasn't a cement slip, after all, but paint that the church slapped on before selling the house. So we aren't sure the stain is going to work -- but it is not returnable, so we'll try it before anything else. One option is to rent a professional spray-gun and shoot the paint off -- even the spray-gun we have, given time to work its magic, will push off the paint. Whatever we do, we have to do it soon -- the walk and steps look horrible -- pallid gray with patches where the paint has pulled off. The dirty steps were at least a rather warm and homogeneous brown.

Another use for the spray-gun is the pathway bricks. It turns out that the sprayer melts the mortar off the bricks like butter. So I spent a very fun hour this afternoon shooting off mortar, cleaning 80% of the bricks in the time it would have taken me to scrape 5% of them (and more thoroughly than by hand).

More about Floors - Kitchen

No work was done on the porch or the garden on Saturday because Andrew was at an all-day PTA Leadership Training Meeting, and Mel was painting someone else's house with REACH, for charity. I turned the radio on loud and started stripping the remainder of the linoleum goo off the kitchen floor. Aside from some aches and pains from two days on hands and knees, and a head full of "Angel in the Morning" and "Like a Virgin" (I gotta change that radio station), it's been a success to balance the frustration of the porch.

When Carolyn visited in February, we three ripped up the wrinkled and warped linoleum that had been put in the kitchen in the 1957 remodeling. We looked at the black and horrid floor beneath and decided it couldn't be saved (although I believe Caro suggested sanding it down). It is really gross -- it is strips of black paper (backing for the linoleum, I'd guess) and globs of glue, and cat hairs and food, all sticking in the floor. The "5 second" rule does not apply in the kitchen. In fact, I'd say it's the "5 centimeter" rule -- if something gets within 5 cm of the floor, it has to be thrown out. It looks grey here, but that's from dirt and dust over the black. We don't, to be honest, even sweep it often, because sweeping seems to create more dust and dirt.

At a sale in March, we purchased about 200 square feet of cork flooring. I am really looking forward to installing it (it's the clickable, floating flooring type).

Well, for some reason it took me 6 months to figure out we might as well try stripping the goo to see what there is to see beneath it. If nothing else, it will make for a cleaner floor in the meantime before we get to installing the cork. So I donned heavy gloves and knee pads, and started glopping Citrustrip, which is a relatively environmentally-friendly stripper.

It's a standard stripping process - glop on, cover with plastic wrap, wait for an hour, scrape off, clean surface with water. And it works like a dream. I have done 2/3 of the kitchen in 2 intense days of intense orange fumes and scrubbing on hands and knees. I think the worst part is the clean-up -- mopping with water. The mop is filthy after two or three passes across the stripped floor, and has to be rinsed out or it just moves the mud around. Every 4 square foot patch has to be mopped-rinsed-mopped 4-6 times (and probably more, but I get really bored with mopping).

I gotta say, the work has paid off beautifully. Under the horrible linoleum and the dirty goo, there is a pretty red fir floor. Probably this is old-growth fir (much of the original house is). The photo is slightly cheating, taken when the floor was wet after mopping. When it dries, it's a dull pale brown -- the wood is untreated.

If we decide to go with hardwood flooring, this will require sanding and polyurethane (not to mention, I have to finish stripping it). We'll find other places for the cork -- the basement, actually, would do well with a warm touch on the floor, or possibly the studio.