More on floor

So, yesterday we discussed our flooring options and were largely leaning toward the engineered hardwood rather than the bamboo. We went in to the kitchen and decided that we needed to remove the linoleum either way. I poked around a bit more and realized that the floor consisted of more layers than I had thought. The subfloor is the lowest layer, and keeps you separate from the basement. The next layer was a very thick (nearly an inch) layer of wood of some kind, and then the hardwood floor that's in the rest of the house, and then two layers of linoleum. There are also some felt layers in there. That's a lot of layers.

It looked like the hardwoods were resting on a layer of felt on top of the thick floor, so I pulled on that a little bit. There was some give. "Hey!" I thought, "maybe I can pull this up and we can put the new floors down on top of the thick floor!" I gave it a pull, and then—crack!—the sound of splintering plywood. They were not hardwood floors at all. The linoleum layers were on top of a sheet of plywood. Well, a fair bit of prying later, we had determined that the "thick floor" is wide planks of wood, cut tongue-in-groove and nailed to the subfloor. Unfortunately, they had a layer of felt glued to them before the plywood was nailed on—good for noise control, but bad for me. It's a bit of a pain to get up, although not nearly the pain of removing the plywood/felt/linoleum/felt/linoleum combination.

So, I've spent the last day prying with a long screwdriver as a chisel (the planks below are protected by that felt). Hammer, hammer, hammer. Puuuuuullllllllllllll! Crack! Hammer, hammer. Repeat endlessly, and then pull up a 1 ft square of plywood and linoleum. How to remove the felt? Scraping takes forever, but a helpful blogger recommended water mixed with vinegar, and it works, albeit with repeated applications. A full day of work got me about 1/5 of the floor. Not great, but doable. When I'm done, sand, stain, finish, and we should have "French farmhouse"-style floors for a rustic look. Hopefully, it will contrast interestingly with the modern high tech Ikea cabinets. But we're kind of committed now.  I am, at least—my wrists ache from constant hammering.