successful stripping

LOOK, LOOK, LOOK!!!! the icky yucky black stuff is coming off the floor, WooHoo!!! It is so officially Happy Dance time, come on join me one…two…three…kick, one…two…three…kick!

The not very nice to walk on, sticky black stuff (like the tar they put down on the roads to hold the little stones in place) is what we were left with as a kitchen floor after a whole entire weekend of smashing slate. Dad had convinced us it would just take an afternoon to remove the slate floor in the kitchen so we thought we’d give it a go.

To be fair if they guy who owned this house before us had laid the slate properly it would have just taken an afternoon. To lay slate you need to screw a board to the flour first then lay a base then glue the tiles to this. This guy who we are now referring to as The Devil Incarnate just glued straight onto the floor boards. When we first realised this was no afternoon job we went to flooring shops to ask for advice and I’m not kidding you the first piece of advice we got was.

“Well, what you need to do is firstly, find out where the guy who laid the floor lives, go around to his house and shoot him”

Not the most encouraging advice.

Another guy told us that if we found anything strong enough to melt the black it would eat the floor boards but he was wrong. After a month and a half of scraping 1cm square per day clear of black, I freaked out. I screamed and yelled at the floor like a crazy woman and told Glenn if he didn’t find something to fix it this weekend I was going to burn the house down because rebuilding would be easier than this. He came home with paint and varnish stripper, not to be used on floorboards, which works perfectly.

So now all we have to do to finish the floor is:

Smash up remaining tiles with sledge hammer (look at the hammer and imagine BIGGER, I couldn’t find the real one)

Use hammer and chisel to magical transform thick black stuff into thin black stuff.

Use stripper to peal of black stuff and induce pink elephant hallucinations, that stuff is strong.

It should only take us another year or so, longest afternoon I’ve ever come across.

P.S For all those people who have witnessed our progress and have kindly suggested that we could have just left it it didn’t look that bad YOU ARE NOT HELPING!!!!!!!