Floor No More, and How to (Mostly) Remove Thinset from Wood Subfloors

As you know, a lot changed in our kitchen last week when we took down the wall dividing the sunroom and kitchen. We went from this:

To this:

In case you missed it, I posted every day that week to update on the progress: here, here, here, here, and here.

And readers were so encouraging about the progress and how fast it was going. But I’m worried I may have spoiled you — that was the one part of the job we hired professionals to do, and it shows in terms of speed. The rest we’re doing ourselves, and I put together a to-do list that has at least 25 projects on it that will take a weekend or more to complete. So…we’re looking at a long time before we can call this baby complete!

That said, we did make a lot more progress over this past weekend immediately following the wall demo, and I wanted to share a little bit today. My dad was in town so that together could try our hand at making cabinets for the first time for the pantry wall. (He’s also the genius behind my amazing workbench, so clearly he has some serious carpentry skills, it’s just a first foray into cabinets.) And we had someone come to measure for our new counters, which was also interesting to observe. But I’m not posting about either of those projects today, because this post would be way too long. I’ll be back next week to share on those, and in the meantime today I’m talking about the floor. Oh, the floor.

As you probably recall, we had major angst related to the floor, which I shared all about and got amazingly helpful feedback from you guys about. Basically, our demo was going to leave us with a few gaps in the floor tile, and we couldn’t find matching tile anywhere so we just didn’t know how to proceed. While there were a lot of creative suggestions from you awesome readers, the overwhelming consensus was that we should just bite the bullet and invest in a new floor since we didn’t love the old one to begin with.

We decided we agreed, and since redoing the floor would require moving everything out of the kitchen and dining area all over again, we thought it made sense to just get the work done as quickly as possible so we could start to return the rooms to some semblance of normalcy — rather than temporarily move everything back in only to have to go through all the relocation work a second time.

So Saturday morning while my dad and I started working on cabinetry, Sam did this:

Now, this was not Plan A. I was very specific with him that unlike all those other idiots online who seemed to just bash up their tile with a sledgehammer and then have a mess of shards to deal with, we should very carefully remove them with a chisel to keep things nice and tidy. But he gave that a try, and it turns out all those other idiots had figured out already that it takes approximately 1 million years to chisel the tiles out one by one. And we had more 350 square feet to deal with, and fewer than one million years to get it done.

It still took him a few hours of bashing, but he got it done.

I LOVE YOU SAM, YOU ARE A CHAMPION.

The one downside was that the sledgehammer shook the floor so badly that 30 years of dust and debris fell from the basement rafters and coated everything down there (which includes all of the kitchen stuff we moved out for the reno) — but we’ll get it cleaned up eventually.

The next step was cleaning up all the tile debris, which Sam did by shoveling small quantities into our yard waste bin, dragging the bin to the edge of our back deck, and emptying the bin into the additional bagster we bought. We have a little gate at the top of the deck that opens to make bringing in groceries and stuff easier, and it came in handy.

The bagster had a tendency to sag on one side, so we tied it up to the deck with a rope to help it keep its shape.

Our neighbor, who is far too nice, came over to assist in the shoveling phase because he heard all the noise we were making and deduced that we clearly needed help. We don’t deserve you, Gerry!

We were excited to discover a few remnants of an even older floor under all that tile. Wowza. I can only imagine what that looked like in combination with the yellow flowered wallpaper we found in the same hallway!

With all the tile up, we were left with our plywood subfloor covered in thick patches of dried thinset.

Now, about 5 minutes of googling revealed to me that tile should not be installed right over the wood subfloor because the wood sucks the moisture out of the thinset and could lead to erosion and cracking down the road. But we had consulted with our contractor while he was in town and determined that we should probably replicate this suboptimal approach because if we installed backer board like should have been done originally, that would increase the floor height by 1/4″ and cause all sorts of uneveness with doorway transitions, trim, etc. So we’ll be tiling right back onto the subfloor, even though we know that really isn’t best practices.

Cleaning up the thinset so that we’re starting with an even surface was a total bear. I’d read a recommendation to use a floor maintainer and diamabrush disc, so we rented those from Home Depot and brought them home. I totally failed to take photos because the experiment was so unsuccessful and I was also still simultaneously building cabinets, but here’s a photo of someone else using one successfully:

In retrospect, I should have paid attention to the fact that their subfloors were concrete, and ours are plywood — and the method they tried first that totally failed them is the one that actually ended up working for us (read on). But let me say definitively that a floor maintainer and diamabrush disc do NOT work on wood subfloors (despite the disc claiming it can be used to refinish hardwood floors). All it did was chew up our subfloor and also start to break apart. So basically it was so strong that it ripped up our floors, but so weak that our floors also broke it. Great. When Sam returned it to Home Depot, the guy told him that the tool rentals are often really bad and he actually intentionally breaks things sometimes so that people aren’t tempted to steal them. I appreciate the honesty, but this does not instill confidence…. He cut us a break and only charged us $7o for the fail, when the charge should have been $150. Thanks I guess?

Next we tried an approach where we totally soaked the subfloor using a mop, let the water sit for awhile, and then started to break off the thinset by hand with one of us using a chisel and the other using our metal ice scraper.

This was actually effective — below is a side-by-side of the before and after. A change in footwear was required because my feet got soaked.

But it was also really slow and really hard. We did the whole sunroom in about three hours, and were so sore that we didn’t think we could do the kitchen the next day (keep in mind that Sam had spent the previous day breaking up all the tile with a super heavy sledgehammer and then shoveling up 350 square feet of tile shards).

So we did some more research, and the next day decide to risk it again at Home Depot and rent a demolition hammer and electric scraper for $100 (the method that failed House of Hepworths, but was recommended by other folks especially for wood subfloors).

It was loud. It was so heavy. But it worked, mostly. It was definitely much faster than doing it by hand like we did in the sunroom, and I think would have been a lot easier if we weren’t already so exhausted from the previous two days. Basically we just took turns hauling it around the room busting up the various thinset patches, and got it done in about 1.5 hours. It isn’t as perfectly flush as in the sunroom where we did it by hand, but it should still be good enough to tile over with a thick layer of thinset underneath.

In the process, our kitchen got totally out of control. The number of times we banged our heads on the stupid chandelier was ENDLESS. The below photos doesn’t come close to showing the chaos, but I love it because after I took it I realized Murphy was sitting quietly in the sun-drenched dining area.

Once we’d completed the thinset removal, I spent a good 1.5 hours with the shop vac cleaning up the remaining tile and thinset shards (including a lot that were lurking under the radiators), and then we moved big things like the island back into place so we could start the week with our kitchen relatively usable. I’m so glad we had a three-day weekend, though back-breaking housework isn’t exactly how I’d planned to spend it (the third Monday in April is a state holiday in Massachusetts called “Patriots’ Day,” which commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord, but is more commonly known as Marathon Monday, when the Boston Marathon is run).

I’ve ordered the tile from Lowes and expect it to arrive in the next 5-7 days, so once that’s here and I have a free weekend I plan to get the floor tiled! In the meantime, we are wearing shoes around the house and hoping not to injure ourselves in the kitchen. Wish us luck….