A new old floor and the Tool of the Year Award.

We picked up work on the gross linoleum flooring this weekend. Despite many hours of back breaking work over the past two weeks, by this past Saturday the floor still looked like this:


After meeting with one of the contractors on Friday we gave in and decided to try the heat gun method. What could it hurt? I was going to try and find a rental, but he suggested just purchasing one since it might end up being roughly the same cost. After a quick trip to the evil HD we came home with this:

One word. Amazing. Work then started moving at a much quicker pace. I started thinking "wow, I may not even be sore after this like I have been over the past week". Wrong. While the heat gun sped things up considerably I still had to spend a lot of time bent over in knee pads. Very sore. Complaints about my sad achy fingers and toes (that's right, fingers and toes) aside this little tool performed like a champ. If anyone out there ever needs to remove a layer (or 2) of liloleum from wood flooring, and I am sorry if you do, then this is the way to go. We were previously sponging on adhesive remover and prying each tile up. Effective, but slow, and required a lot of muscle. The heat gun warmed the adhesive under each tile so that we could then slowly peel it up. After the heat gun worked it's magic we then had to go back over the floor with the adhesive remover and then mop...which we still probably need to do again, cause it's still a wee bit sticky. To whoever decided to put not one, but two layers of this crap on top of perfectly fine wood floors I DO NOT like you. Hmpf.

Progress shots:

Yay! No more linoleum (downstairs). We got all of the tiles up, but are still dealing with some kind of weird paper backing in the front hall. So gross. It will be up before the end of the week so I can show it off to my mom and godmother who are coming up for a week at the Cape!!! So excited.