All Work and No Play

It's a good thing we got all our fun beach time in while Don and Vicki were here, because we have been working hard the past few days. In addition to dealing with modem hassles and finding new washing machines, Denny started ripping up (literally) the ceramic tiles in our kitchen/entry so we could replace them with wood laminate flooring. Whoo boy, talk about misguided intentions.


Denny started off slowly by removing the tiles from the edge of our kitchen slide out. This was our first indication of how difficult the job was going to be. 3/4 inch tiles firmly glued to the plywood subfloor are extremely difficult to pry up.


We had to lay down a layer of floor leveling cement because a lot of the plywood splintered while prying up the tiles. Of course. Because nothing is ever easy when we do a project.


You work with what you've got when you're on the road. Someone left broken bricks behind at the campsite next to us, which worked perfectly for weighing down the new flooring while the glue dried.


Next, starting on the big job--the 12 inch tiles. Denny could only do 6 tiles before he'd have to stop for the day as it took a lot of hard pounding to shatter the tiles and pry them loose from the floor. The bits and pieces flew all over the trailer to boot, so the vacuum cleaner saw a lot more use than it normally does.


Denny girds his loins for the next batch of tile prying while a section of leveling cement dries.


Strangely enough, Denny kept his plumb bob line marker when we sold the house, so he could mark a straight line to lay his first course of boards.


It's starting to look pretty good. The floor is finished between the kitchen slide out and the kitchen island, but we still have the entryway to do off to the upper right of the picture behind the island. But we'll work on that in Georgia as we're celebrating Thanksgiving by being grateful that the job is halfway done and leaving the rest for next week.

In case you're wondering why we'd do this to ourselves, just a few months after we bought our trailer Denny took a rough railroad crossing a bit too fast and a tile cracked right in the middle of the floor. Eventually, a couple other tiles developed a couple of spider cracks and they just bugged me, so a new floor was in order, since our trailer manufacturer hasn't made our model of trailer in four years. I didn't think they would continue to stock individual tiles and there is no way we could have pried a single tile out of the middle of the floor. Ergo, new floor.