Floored

A couple of weekends ago, we finally tore out the water-damaged floor of the bathroom to prepare for its replacement. Once it was gone, we could see the layers of adjacent flooring that had been laid in the kitchen over the years. There must have been at least three different types of floors on top of the subfloor, and the bottom-most flooring caught my dad’s eye. So, what did we find?

Goodbye, mediocre floor. We hardly knew ye.

We decided there was no time like the present to take out the kitchen floor, so we started peeling back the layers.  The top was, of course, the mediocre red-brown vinyl sheeting and its underlayment.  The flooring under that, though, was kind of hilarious:

The terribly ugly linoleum flooring found under the current kitchen floor.

It’s a little hard to see in the photo, but what you’re looking at is a cream-colored linoleum with red and navy blue accents.  Pretty hideous!  I could see it working in a 1950s kitchen, especially if it had a patriotic theme… but no.  It was really banged up, so even if I could ever consider keeping such a floor (I don’t think I could), it wasn’t an option.  The linoleum paper was glued directly to the oldest of the three floors, and that’s where things got interesting.  My father did a little bit of sanding and uncovered this:

A very interesting development.

It turns out that this is a maple floor, and chances are that it was the original floor.  It sits right on top of the subfloor and is very thick, meaning we’ll be able to sand it down to something usable that we can stain and seal.  This is a very exciting discovery because it means that we won’t need to buy new flooring for the kitchen.  And honestly, it’s better than what we would have bought on our budget anyway!  My father has refinished a number of wood floors before and has volunteered to take on that project when the time comes.

Close-up of our (future) new floor.

Hooray for kitchen hardwood flooring!  It is welcome news indeed.