You’re gonna think we’re nuts for starting another room while still in the process of wrapping up the kitchen but I promise it all ties together. Really. Read on…

You see, after wrapping up the floor in the kitchen and nook area, our plan was to continue on toward the entryway/front door to make the space feel more open, airy, and all around more uniform. For the past 2 years (of our ownership) and the past 60 years of this house’s existence slate floors have been the first thing anybody sees when they enter. Is that bad? Not necessarily but the dark black slate was really starting to show its age.

Since the floor in the kitchen is laminate, we thought we could just lay it right over the slate – not so. Turns out our tiles were pretty uneven and it just wasn’t gonna fly. So the difficult decision was made to completely demo the entry. So we called in the big guns:

Daniel (Katie’s cousin) with me on Demo Duty

Nolan (also cousin) Aunt Dede and Mom with Katie on Kitchen Duty

Nana on Chestnut Duty

and Pa on Making-this-job-a-tad-easier Duty.

That’s a solid team right there. The only piece missing? Keegan. Who would have been on demo duty…but was working.

Oh yeah… and we did it by hand. No power tools.

I had rented a “tile stripper” from Home Depot earlier that morning which did absolutely nothing (except tear up the back of my jeep) so I promptly returned it for a full refund and decided to stick to what worked – prying using a crowbar and hammer and lifting using our hands. It was painful.

Then about 3/4 of the way through Katie’s Pa went out and rented us a mini jack hammer. So thankful. Man was that awesome.

Even though we only used it for a quarter of the project it made life so much simpler.

What I thought was going to take several days only ended up taking about 4 hours.

Then later that evening I ran out to HD and grabbed a couple sheets of OSB to use as our subfloor. Give or take 2 hours later and we had the first half of this project finished.

Oh, and here’s the front porch aka makeshift dumpster:

Yeah, not cool.