The demolition.......

 7:20 am - Wednesday - July 5th - LPG&RVR - 59° F, humidity 43%, wind 0 mph out of the southeast.....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 90° F.  On this date in 2014 TLE and I were rafting on the Truckee River with two of our children, and their future spouses.....↴

As I have been alluding all week, Tuesday, July 4th was the beginning of our four day weekend, and the day we chose to begin to replace our 10 year old vinyl 'wood' flooring.  As is often the case we were up earlier than we would like on our first day after getting up before 6 am for four straight days.  After enjoying a cup of coffee we began to move out the salon furniture (two recliners, and my computer work station), and the area rugs, then began the demolition of our old, worn out flooring......

.....after furniture and area rugs were removed I began to remove, and number key planks with unique cuts, so I could use them later as templates when we install the new flooring....

.....next we removed all the wood trim pieces, and then began the hard work.....pulling up vinyl planks which had been glued in place 10 years ago.....

....gradually the linoleum moisture barrier began to reappear......

.....and by 11:30 am we had removed all the old vinyl planking, then, using Acetone, cleaned most of the sticky residue off the linoleum in preparation for the installation of the new planking Wednesday.....

.....we then brought back in the furniture, and area rugs.....in spite of the Acetone bath we gave the linoleum moisture barrier there were still some sticky spots, so we covered those with some red shop rags I've had for years (they were still unused)......

......we turned our rear A/C on by 9 am, and when we finally finished Tuesday's work we turned on the front A/C and then sat in our recliners cooling down, and watching the end of the 4th stage of Le Tour de France.  

We spent the better part of 4 hours on our knees using putty knives to separate the old planks from the moisture barrier, and some of them were quite hard to remove.....when I say 'some' I'm talking about roughly 40%......the other 60% came up easily, but we spent 90% of our time removing the 40% that were stuck like glue to the floor.  TLE was a trooper, as she always is....she never complains, and just puts her head down and gets to work until we're done.  Thankfully the hard work, the preparation for the new flooring, is over.  Now all we have to do is put down the new planks, and reinstall the wood trim pieces, which we'll do over the next two days.

After a suitable cooling down period we got dressed, and drove over to the Clubhouse to have lunch.  We split a 'Smash Burger', and chased it and the fries with a couple of Lost Coast Tangerine brews.  Drinking a beer after that hard work is like taking a sleeping pill for me, and minutes after we arrived back at the Newell I was taking a nap.  I think there were several naps taken during the afternoon.

It is projects like this flooring project that bring to the forefront of my mind how old we are both getting....we'll both be celebrating our 74th birthdays over the next two months.  We've been living full time in our Newell for 12 years now, which is mind blowing all by itself.  This is the third time we've replaced our flooring since we bought the Newell back in March of 2008.  We spent quite a bit more money on this new flooring than we did 10 years ago, and are hoping it will last for a long time....another 10 years would be nice....lol!

Thanks for stopping by!