Do. It. Yourself.

[Originally published on my old blog, circa August 2007]

 

Like many homeowners, I am constantly taking on home-improvement projects, from the simple (planting geraniums around the mailbox) to the mildly complex (installing a new light fixture) to the labor intensive (painting entire rooms, trim and all). And like all homeowners, on occasion, I take on the monstrously stupid .. .

Ah, sit right back and let me tell you a tale about my adventures in kitchen floor replacement.

First off, excuse any typos you see as it’s been nearly a week and although the swelling in my hands has finally gone down enough to type well, it’s far from perfect. (The last post you read was essentially done before I posted it Sunday night, and I was able to add the last few things by holding a pencil in my teeth and pecking at the keys.) I’m not using extra keystrokes to fix anything, so I have to rely on my “award-winning journlasim slills> to git by7.

Over the past year, we’ve redone the kitchen cabinets, walls and counters, so now it was time to do the kitchen floor. After much hemming and hawing, we decided on Congoleum DuraCeramic tiles (Cambridge Fired White, if you must know), which look like ceramic tile but are warmer, softer under foot and “easier to install than conventional ceramic tile.” We order the tile, and although we ask how much the cost is to have it all installed, Mario at the flooring place repeatedly insists, “It’s so easy, you can do it yourself.”

“Really?” I ask. “I’ve never installed any type of flooring or tile. I don’t want to screw it up . . .”

“Really,” he says with all the sincerity of W. assuring a hurricane victim. “Believe me, I can always use the money to install it for you, but your kitchen is a rectangle and it truly is simple to put in.” He explains all the steps to me—which I have to admit, do sound easy. “Besides, you can save yourself quite a bit of money.” He does out the calculations both with him installing it and me installing it. The difference is well over four digits—basically it’s double if he does it.

“All right,” I say. “I guess my biggest concern now is removing the old floor first.”

The old floor is a nasty sheet of hideous aqua vinyl, installed within the past 6 to 7 years by the previous owner, who I’ll just call “Mr. Fixit.” Now know that Mr. Fixit fancied himself a professional contractor and took on many jobs around my old house, apparently attacking each with all the zeal of Tim Allen’s “Home Improvement” character.

I can’t even begin to estimate how many hours I’ve spent undoing things Mr. Fixit has done, like taking down knick knack shelves that he put in with 10-inch screws (no joking—I measured). When Mr. Fixit did it, it was meant to last a lifetime . . . of a small star! One time, it took me an hour to JUST REMOVE a faucet he had installed because he had the thing so over-bolted to the sink. When I had an electrician come to move the power for the stove back to its original spot from where Mr. Fixit had moved it to, the electrician couldn’t believe that anyone claiming to be a professional contractor—let alone a human being—had done the wiring. He showed me; it looked like Stevie Wonder had tried to make a wire octopus out of pipe cleaners! Simply amazing.

This track history gave me trepidation regarding the old flooring. But Mario the floor guy gives me hope. “Most times, people glue the sides down. That’s all you really have to do. I mean, why do more? Where’s the middle of a solid sheet of vinyl going to go if the sides properly secured?” He also suggests putting in a new sub-floor, except when I was working on the cabinets, I had discovered that Mr. Fixit had put a new sub-floor in when he had put down the vinyl. It appears to be in pretty good condition. “Trust me, I know you can do it,” says Mario-wan Kenobi. “Check or charge?”

The flooring comes in after a few weeks. To make things easier, my wife plans to take the kids to her sister’s house in Jersey for the weekend, so they’re not tempted to “help” me. We pick up the tile, the adhesive, a bottle of joint sealer and a special trowel for spreading the adhesive—a foot long, 2-inch wide band of metal with small teeth on one side. I formulate a plan: take off Friday to pull up the old floor, then put the new floor down on Saturday, giving it 24 hours to set before the family comes home. I’m ready!

I mention my upcoming home improvement plans to my friend Joopiter. “You’re really going to do it all by yourself?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I reply. “Although with my luck, I’ll get stuck to the floor like a fly. ‘Heeeelp me!'”

We both laugh.

The Saturday before I’m going to put the floor in, I get a premonition. “Maybe I should try pulling up a little of the vinyl, just to make sure it’s going to come up without too much work,” I say to my wife.

So begins my nightmare. See, Mr. Fixit hasn’t done the simple thing—glue down the edges of the vinyl and a few spots around the middle. No, he has used about a gallon of adhesive for every square foot of floor! He’s used so much, that not only has it bonded the bottom two layers of the vinyl flooring to the sub-floor over most of the room, but the top layer is stuck to the floor as well. After an hour of scraping, cutting and pulling on the floor, I manage get up about 2 square feet of it.

I suddenly realize I may be in for a LOT of work.

Now, some of you more savvy home improvement types might ask, “Why not just rip up the old sub-floor and put a new one down?” Two reasons: 1. That’s requires more skill than I possess alone. 2. If Mr. Fixit has put that much effort into the vinyl, I can only imagine how much work he put into the subfloor. (Sure enough, this is proven later as I find one 2-foot by 3-foot sheet of sub-floor has 67 nails driven into it. Yes, you read right: 67 nails to hold down six square feet of floor, or 11 nails per square foot! Obviously, Mr. Fixit wasn’t shy about using his nail gun to secure things. I think this says something, but I’m not exactly sure what.)

On Sunday, I spend 5.5 hours continuing to scrape the old vinyl and adhesive up, and manage to remove about another 8 square feet of it. Between the two days, I now have spent 7.5 hours and have removed a total 14 square feet, or 1.86 square feet per hour. As my kitchen is 12 foot by 15 foot, which makes for 180 square feet, it will take me approximately 336 hours at my current rate to finish—or 14 full days (a fortnight, for you British fans out there) if I work around the clock, which is a tad longer than the 8 hours I had initially projected.

I decide that I may have to go a different route.

Rather than trying to scrape up every ounce of old glue to have a smooth floor underneath, I get out the sander to see if that might help. It does. In a half hour, I manage to clear a section about half of what it had taken me the earlier part of the day to do. Nonetheless, I estimate it’s gonna take more than 10 hours to get the current floor to the point where I can put down the new one.

And oh, have I mentioned it’s still very warm? I’ve managed to sweat off the equivalent of a whole aboriginal pygmy by now.

Monday morning I wake up and notice my hands are swollen and my back and legs ache. This will not change for the next . . . well, this morning—10 days later—I’m still in this condition. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights, I get home from work, then peel, scrape and sand for two hours each night, slowly making progress. Thursday, I have an evening function for work or I’d have been down on the floor that night, too.

Friday morning rolls around, and I have a little more than half the floor left. I start at about 8 a.m. and work for the next 9 hours (stopping 10 minutes for lunch). As the wife and kids come through the door at 5 p.m., I am physically battered and exhausted, but the entire old floor is gone! Woohoo! I collapse into bed.

The sun comes up, the family leaves, and now it’s just me, 10 boxes of tile, two tubs of adhesive and a nekkid floor. Let the games begin!

I spend the first two hours laying out tile to make it fit the room properly. The instructions say don’t leave any small pieces, but the best overall configuration requires two small pieces near the basement door, about a quarter inch each. Any other cuts around the floor are essentially straight.

I only cut the tile for the first section along the wall, just in case there’s a discrepency after I glue it down—I can cut the tile that will be against the other three walls to fix any problems later. I cut four tiles with a razor in about 4 minutes. “Hey, this is easy,” I tell myself. “What was I worried about?”

I neatly take up the tile, and open the adhesive. “It’s idiot-proof,” Mario-wan Kenobi says in my head. “It goes down blue, and when it gets clear, you lay down the tile.”

I pour a generous portion out, then take the two-inch trowel with the small teeth to spread it. Inside of 30 seconds, however, there is the trowel is covered in the ultrasticky blue goop, as are my hands and arms.

I grab a paper towel to get it off, but the paper towel instantly disintegrates and bonds to my hands. I try to shake it off, but the trowel flies out of my hands and sails halfway down the basement stairs, affixing itself to the carpet there. The adhesive splatters on my sneakers and on the neat stacks of tile. It also gets on my shirt, and when I lean forward to pry the trowel off the stairs, my shirt instantly bonds itself to my pants. I get the trowel up, but more adhesive ends up on my sneakers, sticking me quickly to the old floor.

“Heeeeelp me!” cries the fly.

I slip out of my shoes, peel the trowel off the stairs and head to the downstairs sink, trying not to leave a sticky trail behind me. Thankfully, the adhesive comes off with soap and water, except my fingertips—already raw from a week of peeling off old adhesive—now feel like I’ve gotten paper cuts and rubbed lemon juice into them.

I realize that I need to attach the trowel to something other than my hands, and in a move that would make Macgyver proud, I jerryrig the trowel blade to the scraper handle, doubly securing it with what I now recognize is the 2nd stickiest substance on the planet, duct tape. I head back upstairs, clean up the splatters, and finish spreading the adhesive without much incident.

While waiting for it to turn clear, I decide to tackle the trickier cuts around the basement doors, and after 20 minutes of trying to properly cut one of the small pieces, I learn why they tell you not to leave small pieces. The integrity of the limestone tile is compromised at a certain thinness—if you have ever tried to work with sheetrock, you know what I mean about cutting a piece too small or thin. Eventually, after another 15 minutes and three pieces of tile, I get the two 12-inch strips I need. I handle them like roses dipped in liquid nitrogen.

The adhesive is now clear, so I slowly start placing the new tiles on the floor. As I reach the wall and am just putting down the first tile I cut, I suddenly realize that the piece is about an eighth of an inch over. I try to stop gravity, but it’s too late—the tile touches the adhesive and instantaneously bonds three quarters of it to the floor, with the end up against the wall. I try to pull it back up, and after I lose most of my knuckle hair in the adhesive (an impromptu and exquisitely painful waxing, thanks), I can see if I pull too hard, it’ll break, and only a jagged half will be stuck down. I try to gently force down the part that is stuck up against the wall, but it’s obvious that it might break, too.

“RAT FARTS!” I yell. And I actually do yell this since I’ve deprogrammed the hardcore cussing part of my brain now that I have kids. (Sadly, I find myself sounding more and more like Ned Flanders every day. “Dang-diddly-do, neighborino!”)

I get my razor, and try to trim off a bit of the stuck tile to get it to fit into place. When it’s most of the way down, I give it a push. A small part of the corner breaks off. “DOUBLE RAT FARTS!” I yell. (Pathetic.)

I manage to trim the corner piece and stick in place, and it doesn’t look too bad. Fortunately, I was smart enough to start with the area that will be behind the stove, so this mistake really won’t be seen. But, like the tell-tale heart, I’ll always know it’ll be there. . . mocking me . . . taunting me . . .

Anyway, I get the rest of the section down, and for the next few hours, move steadily through the rest of the floor without too much incident. Sure, I miscut a few tiles (“That’s why you buy extra tile,” says Mario-wan Kenobi) and get one of my socks stuck in the adhesive, but overall, it’s relatively smooth sailing. Of course, by the last half-hour of the ten I’ve spent on it this day, I’m so exhausted that I’m rooting myself on out loud (“Come on you glorious bastard, you can do it. Two more rows of tile. One more row. Eight tiles left. Seven . .. “)

I put down the last tile (which miraculously fits on the first try!), stagger back and sigh like when Luke lets the missiles go down the air vent shaft to finish off the Death Star. It’s done, and no explosions! To celebrate, I order some Chinese food, pick up some ice cream, come home and eat while watching the end of The Natural (which for some reason is on WE—hey, I was channel-surfing!). I know I’m wiped out because I cry at the end of the movie, even though I’ve seen it 76 times. Less than two hours later, about 9:30 p.m. EDT, I crawl into bed and pass out.

I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and scurry out to the kitchen. The new floor glistens in the moonlight. None of the tiles have popped up, and from what I can tell, no aliens have made crop circles in it. It’s still there and still done.

“Told you, you could do it yourself,” says Mario-wan Kenobi in my head.

“F#ck off,” I say out loud, and go back to bed.