I’ve been quiet here on the ol’ blog for a couple of weeks. Mostly because I’ve been very busy. Not the good kind of busy either. The bad kind of busy, that involves a lot of work and a lot of money. We’ve spent the last two weeks and several hundred dollars fixing our kitchen, and will probably spend the next two (or more) weeks and more than another thousand dollars finishing what we’ve started.
It all started with a little soft spot in the floor. We didn’t think much of it – probably a little dry rot. Then the spot got bigger (fairly quickly). I crawled under the house, and really didn’t see anything alarming. My mom was coming to visit, so we decided not to do anything until after she left. Once mom was gone, we decided to pull up the vinyl flooring in the kitchen and take a better look at what was going on.
Words can not well describe what we found. I have pictures, that will be uploaded later – a photo essay of the rebuilding of our kitchen. Anyhow, underneath the vinyl is a layer of sheathing – about a 1/4 inch thick sheet of very smooth plywood. It was damp, and moldy. Very damp and very moldy. We decided to pull up some of the sheathing. Underneath the sheathing was a layer of vinyl tile – it’s not unusual to have multiple layers of floors – more mold on the vinyl tiles, so we pulled up some of those. Underneath the vinyl tiles was a layer of particle board, and it is this layer that has spelled doom for our kitchen.
Now, maybe you’ve never seen what happens to particle board when it gets wet. It goes through a process. First it soaks up water like a sponge and expands. Then it will spread the water around. Then it will disentegrate.
So, we pulled up – or rather scraped up – some of this rotted, disentegrating, moldy particle board, and finally found the original sub-floor, which is a layer of plywood. Plywood makes a good subfloor – it’s generally water resistant and very sturdy. However, when you have a sponge, er…water soaked particle board, laying on it for who knows how long, it does eventually break down. Hence the soft spot in the floor. The plywood was wet and moldy and rotten (none of which was visible from underneath).
We did some more investigating. Turns out our cabinets had some significant damage to them too. Behind the oak facing, guess what they’re made out of? Ding ding ding! That’s right – particle board! The cabinetry had a contact-paper-like lining all over the inside of it. We pealed this off and suddenly we could see all this water damage to the cabinets.
More investigation lead us to conclude that our dishwasher had been leaking. The water was leaking underneath the topmost layer of vinyl flooring – we NEVER saw any water on the floor.
So we called the insurance company, ’cause this was not going to be a case of “pull up the vinyl and replace a few square feet of sub-floor that’s dry-rotted” afterall.
Though the insurance did not pay for the floor, it fortunately did pay for the cabinets. Cabinets are expensive. Really expensive. And the labor to replace cabinets is really expensive. So, by doing it ourselves we will have enough to replace the cabinets and the floor.
By the time it was all said and done, we removed the entire kitchen floor, about half of the dining room floor, and nine of the floor joists under the floor. Imagine an 8 foot by 15 foot hole where the kitchen used to be. We also replaced half of the wall that was behind the sink/dishwasher. Not the left half or the right half of the wall. The bottom half.
After two weeks of ripping out and replacing, we now have a structurally sound kitchen and dining room floor again. Still remaining is the replacing and rebuilding of cabinets, and the finishing of the flooring since right now it is just bare sub-floor.
Tearing all of the damage out was depressing, since it just kept going and going and going… The next two weeks will be better I think, since what we’re doing now is more like re-modeling, and our kitchen will look nice and new when we’re done.
Photos soon!
