Tearing up floors is a B

We are doing a complete overhaul of the first three rooms in our new house. It is a lot, a lot, a lot of work but I know that it will pay off and look gorgeous once we are done. We are tearing up floors, securing the sub-floor (I didn't even know what a sub-floor was before last week), refinishing cabinets, tearing out an old back splash and replacing it with an awesome glass tile mosaic one, repairing the molding in some areas, and we are painting all the walls. We are about half way done with our list of 'move in' projects. We, or should I say Josh, started by tearing out the floors. Lucky for us, there wasn't only one, but four layers of flooring in some parts of the downstairs. He has been such a hard worker and ripped through all of them in just two or three days, after putting in a full day at the office. He is awesome.

I spent a lot of Saturday pulling staples out of the linoleum in our kitchen. We then had to move all the torn out wood and linoleum from these rooms to the backyard patio area where it will wait to be picked up.

This is the floor that we had to tear out. I felt really bad getting rid of it because it was really charming and I think might have been original to the house in one room. It was necessary though. The sub-floor needed some repairing and securing.

Enlarge this picture to take a look at just a fraction of the nails we had to pull out of the sub-floor. They didn't come out with the wood we tore up so we spent SEVEN hours pulling these babies out. I was pretty sure I was going to cry by the end of that day.

This isn't even all of them! We literally pulled out thousands of nails and staples from this crappy sub-floor.

Josh seriously is such a hard worker. I wish I could help him more than I can. I am just not strong enough to do some of these projects. Here he is putting screws in every 4-6 inches throughout the sub-floor to resecure it and make it safer and quiet. It was so squeeky before we started all of this. Now it doesn't dare make a sound, it knows my husband will come after it.

The next step to getting the floor ready for our new beautiful wood is laying tar paper.

On top of this will go ply wood, again nailed in every four to six inches, a moisture and sound barrier and then finally our new floors! I am so excited and can't wait to see the house once these are in. They are going to transform the entire place!