Floor Removal

Well I spent all of Monday thinking about how I was going to tackle this concrete floor issue. I finally decided that(with the help of a borrowed sledgehammer) I'd just beat on it and see how strong it was. Maybe I'd be able to just nibble away at the edge until I'd chipped away the whole floor. HA! HA HA! Get this...If you happened to read Day 2's post, you saw the picture showing the 2" concrete floor I'm referring to. Check out what was REALLY under there:

That's 5.5, count em, 5.5 inches of concrete! The perspective in the photo is a little off, and the shadows are kinda hiding the full thickness(look behind the tape), but believe me, that's 5.5 inches of concrete. Wow. It took about 10 minutes of busting, chiselling, sledging, swearing, praying, and pleaing for me to get enough removed so that I could take this photo. This is clearly not working, so...

"Say hello to my little friend!"

Mr. 5.5" Concrete Slab, meet Mr. Kilti AVR-905 Breaker Hammer. How do you do? Just fine, and yourself? Not bad, not bad at all...

The rental guy at Home Depot told me that this hammer was would remove any slab up to 2 inches. However, I figured that since this slab was suspended, with not much support underneath, it could do the job. It made pretty easy work of it. It was fairly slow going, but relatively painless work. Working along the edges, it cut right thru the concrete with no problem. Allen took care of the crap work, shovelling and carting the debris out of the way as I chiselled, making sure there was room to work. I think in all it probably took us close to 3 hours to remove the whole thing. If I were doing with the sledgehammer, I'd still be in there working.

Here's some pics in various stages of progress:

Finally, down to the 1x subfloor.

Not a bad night's work. Many thanks, once again, to Allen for all the unsolicited help he's already given us. He's taken up the not-so-fun-but-necessary tasks which helps maximize the time I can spend doing other things. I'm %100 sure that without his help, we wouldn't even be half as far as we are.

So next up...There's still a little bit of cleanup left to do before I can start rebuilding. I still need to pull up the subfloor boards, clean up as much debris that's fallen into the crawlspace as I can, pull all the old nails out of the studs, and just clean it up in general. Once I get that out of the way I'll be ready to start rebuilding.

I'm thinking, now that I can see more of the underlying structure, that I'll probably just be rebuilding the entire floor structure. The beams around the room's walls seem to be in great shape, but not so for some of the joists. And those that are still in good shape are laid out rather oddly. On top of that is the fact the the subfloor is recessed about 6" to make room for the rediculous concrete slab. I'll need to raise the subfloor up a good 4" to make the eventual tile floor level with the rest of the house. Also, this huge slab was adding a ton of rigidity to the floor, so now, with that gone, I'll need to be careful to make the new subfloor as stong as possible to reduce flexing and cracking the tile that's going to cover the floor(if I ever get there!). At least we're wrapping up demolition and getting close to the actual construction :).

After rebuilding the structure, I suppose it will be time to tackle the plumbing. Not really looking forward to that, but I don't suppose it will be all that bad since everything is exposed. I think I've decided to remove(or at least bypass) the existing galvanized supply lines and just go with new plumbing in the whole room. Shouldn't be too bad...weighing my options here. Copper, tried and true standard, but expensive. CPVC, MUCH cheaper and I hear it insulates quite a bit better than copper... PEX? Who knows...still researching this.

More fun to come!