It was just covered up!

Let’s start this week with one simple fact: The House on the Isthmus is always surprising me which is saying rather a lot considering the number of surprises we’ve ushered in the last six months. Now that we’ve confirmed that, brace yourself for its latest surprise.

Now we can proceed with the story leading up to it.

My bedroom door installation was no easy feat. In fact, a detail I left out of the story from a couple of weeks ago was that I actually intended for it to swing left and into the corner of my bedroom. That ended up not being possible because the floors aren’t level and it would ground out when we went to open it.

To get started on the original plan, I had to remove the transition piece from between the hallway and my bedroom. That also meant removing just a little bit of the flooring in the hallway so that we could drop the door into its desired position.

The floating floor pretty much untouched

A couple of weeks ago, the City of Madison sent me a note letting me know that they took exception to my Bagster being in the front yard and that it had to go. Since it wasn’t full and I don’t want to upset the City, I decided to pull up the old flooring (since I now knew there was hardwood underneath it all) to fill the Bagster with whatever pieces I couldn’t salvage before the deadline for it to be taken away. When we hung the door, I pulled only a couple of tiles before moving on to other projects around the house.

It’s not like I expected to just pull up the existing floating cork floor (that I think was one of the lipstick on a pig projects completed right before I bought the house) and magically find nice hardwood floors. I hoped, maybe, but I didn’t see myself getting as lucky as in The NewRoommate’s room twice… and I didn’t.

Underneath the floating floor (so called because it’s not glued or nailed down to anything, it just locks to itself) was a floor pad (not interesting) and under that gem was linoleum tile. Not vinyl peel and stick, mind you. It was linoleum. Now, linoleum is actually a great, period correct floor covering material in certain forms but this was more like the 1960s and didn’t quite fit one of those forms.

The floor pad - yep, that's duct tape!

Trust me, keep reading, it’s about to get good.

Up came the floating floor in about ten minutes and I managed to save six of the 12-15 boards that compiled the hallway floor to donate later. Best demo project ever.

Then up came the pad and there it was, my latest surprise from Isthmus House: a grate set into the floor.

After some diligent scraping of the tar-paper-like adhesive with my very glamorous floor scraper (a razor blade on a paddle, essentially) everything that could go in the aforementioned Bagster did.

Once everything was up that was going to come up, I baby-powdered the floor to make it less tacky and wiped it all down.

I realize it’s not done yet, but doesn’t it look better at least? I can't wait to get them fully refinished!