Tile ...

Yesterday, after talking to my brother who recommended I call a tool rental place to find out what I could use to break up the tile, I called Tates Rents or some such thing. They recommended a big electric hammer type of thing. Cool. Said they'd charge me $90 for the whole day, or $70 if I took it on my way home from work and returned it the next morning. So I figured I would talk to Kirk about it first.

I stopped by WalMart and picked up some goggles and home I went to pound some more tile. Thankfully, by getting the initial few tiles up, it provided a little bit of "wiggle" room and the tiles were starting to come up in larger chunks and eventually even some in whole pieces. Still ... very strenuous and tiring work. And ... don't get me wrong ... MOST of it was still coming up in little itty bitty pieces. Just as I was starting to cuss at all of it, a truck pulls into the driveway. Who is that? IT'S KIRK ... AND JANIE! Woo hoo! Kirk already
had one of those hammer things with him and had bought a new bit for it! Awesome! Things started moving very quickly then. Janie sees me hit the hammer a couple of times, and does her, "Gimme that!" I handed it over to her, along with my gloves and goggles. She starts hammering away, while Kirk is using the big hammer thingie, and I start handling the removal of everything that is now coming up. I found one glove in my truck that had holes in two of the fingers, but I guess 3/4 of one glove is better than no gloves at all when dealing with very sharp slate tile.

I had put the 4" x 4" tiles from the counter in the trash the night before, and you would not believe how heavy that made the trash can. I couldn't add anything to it, so I humped that heavy thing all the way down my driveway and set it in the street in hopes of the trash people picking it up despite its weight. Janie and Kirk were making quick work of the tile in the kitchen so I grabbed the large metal dustpan my son bought a few months ago, and the rock rake and started cleaning up around them and bringing piles of tile and tile pieces outside as fast as I could go. A broom took care of the stuff the rock rake missed, and the shop vac will handle the rest.

Once the main part of the tile was gone, we called it a day. We'll go back tonight and clean up and get up the rest of the little bit of tile on the floor. Then all I have to do is the rest of the countertops ... which is a piece of cake in comparison.

Here's some photos.  The main floor area.

This is where the refrigerator will go, and where the hookups for the washer used to be.  (I had the washer hookup moved to the "second bedroom" ... aka the "utility room".)

Here's the countertop where I've removed the tile, but I need to remove the rest of the crap and get down to the wood.  The backsplash is staying.

Here's where the water heater used to be (see Kirk?  I didn't call it the "hot water heater"!!  LOL).  The water heater joined the washer in the other room.

And finally, here is the tile Kirk will be laying for me.

As you can see, there is a ton of work to be done in the kitchen.  I will hopefully be taking down the cabinet doors tonight and getting ready to start stripping them for paint.  The entire kitchen needs painting (other than the ceiling ... thank YOU Janie!) but I imagine that gets done after the countertop?  I don't have a clue.  We'll see, I guess.

So there will be a lot of activity at the house this weekend.  I'd like to get the curtains up in the bedroom, and potentially paint the second bedroom while Kirk is doing tile, but I don't know if that's a good idea with as much dust flies with tile.  There are plenty of other projects I could work on ... putting up curtain rods, fixing the light to the fan in the living room, etc.  Janie said she can start on the curtains soon.  Woo hoo!  It's starting to feel like we're hurdling over some massive obstacles here.
Happy tails,
Jodi