Seven-layer floors

When we bought our house, four years ago, we had most of the carpet and linoleum ripped up, revealing beautiful oak floors underneath, which we had refinished. The only room in which we did not do this was the kitchen, because we (and the floor refinisher I hired) were unsure whether there were good floors in the kitchen to be refinished. We’re updating the kitchen piecemeal: we repainted the walls, in two phases, and with much help from my father, we repainted the kitchen cabinets as well. We put open shelving on one wall, and fashioned a counter from Metro shelving and bamboo butcher block.

So finally it was time to address the floors, which meant ripping out the existing vinyl and seeing if we had wood to refinish, or whether we’d need to buy some new floor covering. My friend rg agreed to help with the ripping out, and as it turns out, we removed six layers of older flooring to expose a finish-able pine floor.

To begin with, the vinyl that was our floor:

(It isn’t this brown–this is an artifact of the lighting.) But it was old, and dirty. Underneath this was a layer of square tiles:

Underneath this was a layer of eighth-inch thick plywood. The plywood was attached with several dozen wood screws: finding and extracting these was perhaps the most time consuming part of the whole process.

Here are the nails that held it down:

Below the plywood was the most hideous of the layers, a yellow vinyl:

Beneath the yellow layer, and tightly bound to it, was a layer of off-white square tiles:

Below this was what I believe was the original kitchen floor: blue linoleum.

If we had wanted to “restore” the house to its 1941 look, this blue linoleum is what we’d be after, but we’re not.

The blue, white, and yellow layers were all very strongly attached to one another and mostly came up as a whole, to reveal the wood floor covered with the remnants of a black adhesive:

This is the stage rg and I got to Sunday. Fortunately, the guy who finished my other floors said his crew would be available today, Wednesday, so they came over and went to work. After sanding the floors, their method is to apply a coat of shellac, which dries in about a half an hour, and then a coat of water-based polyurethane, which does need to cure overnight. This is certainly expedient, compared with other schemes that use multiple coats. Opinions vary as to the ultimate durability of multiple coats versus a single coat, but I do appreciate getting nice floors after only one day’s work.

In the case of the kitchen, the floors were pine, not oak, and were never finished. The pine was never intended to be the top layer–I suspect it was simply the cheapest substrate for the blue linoleum available at the time. So the pieces weren’t chosen for aesthetics, and in addition to a variation in coloring of the wood, there’s also nearly seventy years of kitchen abuse to the unfinished wood. This all adds up to a sort of rustic look, much more so than with any of the other floors in the house.