In which demolition happens...

Though all of these are posted today, this project has been ongoing for a few weeks.  I am working on it as I can. One of the first things I did was remove the roof, so I could plot out how I might make it look more like this, but not as deep on top. Sort of half way between the original and the roof line below.

Last week I began on removing the floors, starting with the living room.  It was both easier and more difficult than I anticipated.  Under the wood flooring sheet was the original attempt at a paper parquet.  Decades ago, when J installed the first floor, she and her mother agreed that it just wasn't quite right, and didn't really look like wood.  Luckily J's mom found the wood floors and things progressed from there.

I removed the floor as carefully as I could, using a metal putty knife to slide below and gently lift. Here are some images of that process.

It did not come up as prettily as it did in some of the blogs I have been reading for research/reference/fun.

Luckily it came up in sheets for the most part.  It had been glued down to a paper backing when it was manufactured. J then glued this down to the floor.  It came up with very little damage to the backing paper, so I should be able to reuse them in the way I hope to. I think I have decided to leave the kitchen floor as it is.  A big part of me wants to leave some of the original influence.

This was a sticky process. Once I got the floor up we gently sprayed down the area with water and began to scrub off the glue. The second floor was made more difficult by the fact that firstly, there was not parquet flooring underneath. Secondarily, J learned as she went. There was way more glue on the second floor.

This process took a few hours. I'd peel up a floor, spray it down, scrub and scrape, and let it sit while I began on the next one. The bathroom was the worst of the lot for me. Not only was the glue job more through, we jokingly said that she must have used a bottle and a half on the floor of the bathroom alone.

By the time I finished for the evening, I was so very sticky, my tools were sticky, a scrubber was ruined, and sticky.  I had only gotten up about 2/3 of the glue from the upper floors, but it was time to be done.  You might also notice that some of the wallpaper has been removed, J worked on the downstairs while I was removing the bathroom floor. Next time I will update with pictures of the hopefully glue-free and clean floors.