The second massive mess: Woman vs laminate
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So I’d pulled down the wall, opened up my living room and finally managed to relax on my sofa, when I realised I still had some problems.
The most immediate one was that the dogs couldn’t walk in the house. Their paws kept slipping and sliding on the laminate flooring and I was having to seriously fight for my space on the sofa. The answer was clearly to rip out the laminate.Well it was ugly and it was going anyway.
My plan has always been to uncover the original wooden floors in the house, sand them down and varnish them. I’ve seen the same thing done in other houses of a similar period, so I know it’s going to look good, and I much prefer wooden floors downstairs to carpeted ones. The living room and hallway have been covered in cheap, ugly, bright yellow laminate, which clash nicely with the lovely stained orange doors and skirting boards, so I decided my next task would be to pull this out. Better I reasoned, a building site that the dogs could scamper round, than a taste free home that had them living on my sofa.I emptied the living room of all the furniture before I began pulling the floor up and piled it in the room between the living room and the kitchen.
Then I got to work. I kicked off at the front door, armed with a crowbar and started levering up the laminate. I didn't realise at this stage that you could rent machines to lift laminate but to be honest this part had been so badly laid I really didn't need to bother.
In the hallway the laminate had been laid after the skirting boards had been fitted, so it came up easily, and was stacked in the back of the van to be taken to the tip. I was really pleased to see that the floorboards underneath were in good shape.
As I began pulling up the floor in the living room I started to run into problems. The 'lovely' orange skirting boards had been fitted after the floor had been laid, so the only way that I could take the floor up was to prise off the skirting boards on one side of the room.Unfortunately the skirting boards had been glued to the walls and taking them off pulled large chunks of the plaster off too. Better yet the “beautiful” faux marble fireplace (again I so wish I had a picture to show you) had been laid on top of the flooring, so my only choice was to remove the fireplace in order to get all the laminate up.
Fortunately, as with everything in the house, the fireplace had been badly fitted and was very easy to remove. I unscrewed the wooden fireplace surround, which was only fixed to the wall by two wood screws, and once that was out of the way the rest was simple. There were two large sheets of faux marble; one against the wall and one on the floor over the laminate, neither of which were attached to anything and could be lifted out of the way. Fortunately for me the electric fire wasn’t wired in, and instead had a plug on a flex, so I didn’t need to get an electrician back in to remove it.
Once all the detritus had been cleared from site, along with the end of the laminate, I was overjoyed to find the original dark red Victorian hearth tiles set into the floor. They are cracked and filthy, but they’re gorgeous and I really hope that I can clean them up properly. I can’t understand why anyone would choose to cover them up, especially with the rubbish that was over them.
I have some other problems too. Because the skirting boards had been fitted after the flooring there’s a substantial gap between the skirting boards and the floor, where they’re still attached to the wall; where they’ve been removed there’s a five-inch gap of bare brick, more in the places the plaster had cracked off above them. So I now have space the dogs can run around in without falling over and the sofa to myself, but I have a living room that looks more of a mess than ever.
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