I think the way I feel about vinyl floors is the same way some people feel about wire hangers.

Of course, the top floor of the house was covered in vinyl flooring. In some cases, many  layers of vinyl flooring, like a sandwich of ugliness. I spent two days pulling it up with my trusty Rival iron, a scrape-y tool and the most amazing pair of work gloves I have ever owned. In this case, good gloves were key, since this crap is sticky beyond belief.

Layers and layers of vinyl. The top layers is vinyl’s best attempt at looking like wood…

For most part, the vinyl tiles lift up fairly easily once you heat them up with the iron (I found that the cotton setting works best). What it leaves behind is a sticky mess – and in some cases, a heavily damaged wood floor that is in need of some love.

Before: the floor in all its vinyl glory. 

After: no more vinyl

After a weekend of basically ironing the floor, our top level looks like this:

There is still a huge amount of work ahead to get these floors in any kind of decent shape. We are hoping to save most of it, although the front room (the foreground in the picture above) has some serious damage – which was not helped at all by the tile glue. I was bummed that I didn’t find oak flooring with intricate inlay patterns. But I am ecstatic that at least it’s no longer covered in  Dinosaur-by-product.