Pulling up an Old Floor

With the plastering done and a first coat of stain on most of the woodwork, I turn my attention to the floor. The initially had some cheap peel and stick square tiles on it and now those are completely trashed from all of the plastering and paint stripping. I wasn’t planning to keep the tiles so I didn’t bother putting down drop cloths. A lot of the tiles were loose enough to pull off by hand where I saw an underlayment of wood on top of the original pine floors. I also noticed that there are 2 layers of tiles with the less sticky more modern tiles and then an older design below that. The older tiles seem to be stuck with real glue and require a little bit more elbow grease to scrape them off.

As I get some tiles off, I then start pulling up the underlayment and it starts easily tearing as I get a putty knife under it to pop it off. I originally thought it was going to be more luan plywood, but it’s just particle board. It’s fragile enough that I can tear it off in chunks with my bare hands. There’s a good amount of nails to secure it down so I then spend time pulling those so I cut up my hands or legs as I’m scooting around on the floor ripping up the floor. The original pine is dirty and there’s a lot of sections with white haze which I assume is from white paint used on all the woodwork. I start taping off the baseboards and slathering on chemical stripper to see if I can clean up the wood. It comes up fairly clean with little effort so that’s a bonus.

As I make my way through the entire floor, I find a few surprises. In the back corner of the room where there was a refrigerator and the baseboards were removed, I find a section of the floor replaced with plywood. Luckily I honed my floor graining technique because I’ll need it again here. A little in front of the plywood I feel a heavy metal plate under the tile. It’s held loosely on with a screw and once I remove that I see the wood floor was cut away into a square shape. I pull the pieces of the floorboards out and see copper water pipes running in the floor. There’s also some old knob and tube wiring. My guess is this was an access panel to help run the pipes or knob and tube. It’s possible this wasn’t a dry kitchen and had water in it or maybe it was done to run the water up from the kitchen to the 2nd floor bathroom.

I put the metal plate on to deal with later and continue removing the tiles and particle board. I get the entire floor down to the original wood and continue stripping the wood around the baseboards.