Kitchen Demo, and Then Some

Today demolition began in earnest on my kitchen. This is what it looked like at 9:00 a.m.:

And this is what it looked like by 12:30 p.m.:

Island: gone. Countertops and backsplashes: gone. Contractors: almost gone.

After the pounding of hammers and pry bars attacking tile, the whine of the Shop Vac, and the hollering of men trying to make themselves heard, the house is now blissfully quiet. They've gone to lunch. Or to plan new attacks on our auditory systems. Whatever.

For now, the noise has stopped. The pugs and I are all enjoying a respite from the mayhem.

I created some mayhem of my own, this morning.

What do you think happens when you take three well-fed pugs for a walk, they do their duty, you pick it all up, you plop it all into a 35-year-old guest bathroom toilet that doesn't get used all that much...and then you flush?

Yeahhhhhhhhh.

It was like something out of a nightmare. The waters rose higher and higher, and I'm thinking, "It'll go down; it always does."

Except that it didn't. And a moment later, I had a horrible, stinky, massive tide of sludge writhing up and over the toilet bowl and spilling out everywhere like some Fountain from Hell. I completely forgot there's a valve on the wall I could've used to stem the tide. All I could do was to shriek and throw towel after towel at it.

And in one minute, the wall-to-wall carpet (yeah, carpet on a bathroom floor--how dumb is that?) was wall-to-wall hideousness.

There was nothing to do but rip it up.

I asked one of the guys hammering away at my kitchen to slash the carpet at the bathroom door with his utility knife. And then I got down on my knees and got to work.

The carpet and spongy stuff underneath were up in a flash. I heaved the soggy mess into the dumpster along with all their demo trash.

Underneath was decent flooring...sort of:

Well, it's linoleum. It was wet and filthy and the carpet tack strips around the toilet sodden, but it's at least better than finding soaking wet plywood for a subfloor.

I got to work pulling up all the wood, nails, and staples:

And I prayed that my Tetanus shot is still working:

Then I shot over to my local bath shop and used coupons to get some fluffy white scatter rugs.

You can still see the rusty nail and staple holes around the edges, if you look for them. But this is better than where I started this morning!:

(Phew!)