A Remodeling Surprise
Remodeling projects often bring surprises for homeowners because one never knows just what they’ll find when walls are opened up and floors removed. What exactly did the original builder or previous owners do with the electric and plumbing? Contractors always have stories about the crazy things they’ve seen on their jobs once they get to the demolition phase and take down the sheet rock or plaster. Often these surprises are not good and increase the cost of the project, as additional work is needed to fix or work around them.
We started our destruction phase today and actually ended up with a happy surprise. Currently our kitchen has laminate flooring. During the budgeting phase we determined that we wanted hardwood flooring so that it would match the rest of the house. When viewing the floor from below in our basement, it appeared that there was plywood underneath the laminate. No hardwood from the original kitchen seemed to exist.
So today when I started removing the shoe molding around the edges of the cabinets and saw some distinctive wood graining I yelled “Hardwood!” Let’s just say I picked up the pace and started demolishing a little bit faster. A short time later we pulled up some of the laminate and revealed this…
Turns out the original fir flooring is still intact. We’re hoping that a good refinishing and some repair work will bring it back to its original beauty.
And now we’re really knocking on wood that we only have more good surprises going forward with this project.
Here are the previous posts about our adventure:
Remodeling Our Kitchen
Budgeting for a Kitchen Remodel
Designing a Kitchen
Our Before Kitchen
Our Temporary Kitchen
Excellent surprise!
What the heck are people thinking when they cover beautiful wood floors with laminate?
I think the issue is that the flooring is running in various directions in the room. When the house was originally built, the kitchen was a series of small rooms with dividing walls (pantry, refrigerator room, and then the actual kitchen). Previous owners took out the small rooms, but you can still see where they were based on how the flooring runs because it’s going in different directions. We’ll need to pull it up and have it re-layed, which we’re willing to do. I guess the previous owners just felt the laminate was easier and didn’t want to go through that extra step.
Yay! Very nice. I’m hoping for a similar good surprise when I rip up the hideous tile floor in my kitchen.
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