Whew. Tonight’s project took me close to an hour and you’d never know it.

Before going at the floor with a pry bar, I wanted to know what I was dealing with. Was it a floating floor? Was it lying on the same level subfloor as the previously-carpeted rooms? Did it have some sort of underlay?

What I did was use a chisel to carefully remove a top layer of floor, roughly 2″ by 4″ in a discreet corner. I made this piece as neat as possible so that it could be replaced if I got to the subfloor and decided that the hardwood was staying. I then chiseled one thin layer of wood after another until I got to a stiff plastic opaque vapour barrier. Under that, I found the same subfloor as in the study.

I’m therefore good to go for the removal of the hardwood. It still feels SO wrong, but it really is the right decision in the long run.

The biggest difficulty is that motorhome walls are the last thing to be installed, so the hardwood runs under the walls. I will have to use a combination of chisel and pry bar to remove those boards, but the boards in the middle of the room will come apart with a minimum of fuss.

The forecast is for sun all of my weekend (Tuesday through Thursday) and if this holds I will be SO happy!!! I’m going to do like last week and push up my bedtime to get up early enough to add several hours of sunlight to my day. I’d like to have all three boxes of flooring installed by Wednesday night, which should take me to the kitchen. I’ve decided to not go with my usual habit of doing trim last and instead doing the trim as I go along. There’s no point reusing any existing trim as it is all a weird hodgepodge of materials and sizes. I plan to go with a uniform style in wood. Most of the trim now is cardboard, which makes no sense in wet rooms!

There’s no time to waste. I am expected in Dawson three months from today!

Tonight, I pulled up the Allure flooring I installed a year and a half ago. It felt horrible to do so in that the flooring was in perfect shape, but I am so sick of it! I remember why I picked it at the time, and still think the reasons were valid, but that floor was not meant to last the ten or so years I intend to spend in Miranda.

The Allure came up easily. It’s a floating floor so I didn’t have to wrestle with tacks or anything, but the tabs joining the slats were as sticky as ever. I ended up pulling them apart with pliers to save my hands. It took me about an hour and a half to lay that floor and ten minutes to throw it in the garbage. Oh, what a consumerist society we live in. Guilty as charged.

The underfloor still looks good, but I need to get rid of the remaining carpet tacks from the left side of the room.

That little bit of carpet, about 1’x2′, took me an hour to remove this morning!

With the bedframe out of the way, I have an almost perfectly rectangular room measuring 37 square feet (not counting the space at the back where the mattress is). It feels huge!!!

I’ve been trying to guess how many boxes of Allure I’m going to need this time around and the answer is going to be ‘more than I thought.’ Shoot. Each box is 24 square feet. Last time, I did both the study and the lounge with three boxes. I calculated that I’d need at most five to compensate for the extra square footage in both rooms and to throw in the kitchen and dressing room. I think I’ll need at least six. At any rate, I have three boxes on hand and will see how far I get with them.

Laying the new floors is going to present me with  new challenges since it won’t be like laying out the tile-type flooring. I’ll need to stagger the planks and I’ll also have to lay them out lengthwise. I remember laying the floor in my house with my dad the same way. We started in one corner of the house and couldn’t do just one room at a time as our planks would eventually reach a door and spill into the next room. It’s much easier to do one room at a time and add thresholds between the rooms, but I also remember how much easier it was to sweep a smooth surface from one end to the other. I’ll therefore have to start pulling up the hardwood in the dressing room before I can start laying out the Allure in the study. I have no idea yet what sort of job that’s going to be.

Another challenge will be that the rig is not empty. A good installation of Allure needs to be dust free and that’s going to be pretty much impossible to achieve this time around. I’m going to make sure the study and dressing room are as clean as I can make them, then kick the cats out into the front part of the rig. Thank goodness for doors!

One thing will make this job easier than laying out the tile look, however: no grout marks to line up. I made a couple of small mistakes with the original floors and they bugged the heck out of me although the casual observer would probably not notice them.

Finally, knowing that the corner I intend to start with is 100% square will greatly help me get a good start on the project since I won’t have to spend time figuring out how to get a straight first row.

Well, it’s already three and instead of doing like yesterday and going to sleep at 6AM (a bit much, even for me!) because I’m so wound up, I’m going to go take a hot bubble bath. Housesitting does have its perks over RV park life. 🙂