The ugly cork flooring (two layers, and accompanying carpet tacks) is now mostly gone. The only bit left is under the washing machine, which we haven’t moved yet for obvious reasons.
One of the keys to effective removal of anything in your house is to ask around a bit, if not friends then Google. Find out other ways people deal with this stuff. Our friend Ben gave me invaluable advice for scraping up the lower layer of the cork (the actually glued on part). You use a joint knife and a hammer. You just get right in there and hammer the joint knife underneath and lever parts of the cork up as you scrape them up. I use a thick bathmat under my knees to help them from getting too sore - though my knees peeled anyway - and always try to keep a straight back where possible.
I finally discovered that the easy way to remove carpet or floor tacks is to get a small vice grip and once the cork is removed from around it use this to pull up the tack. One thing to be sure of is that you place a piece of the just-removed floor or similar underneath the vice as you pull because you will end up with a small indentation of the vice otherwise. The tool costs about $18 from your local hardware store and will save you hours, sore hands, frustration and probably injury.
To give you an idea of timings - the separate toilet probably took me about 8 hours all up. This is partly because it was the first time I’d done this (learning curve) but also it’s a tiny space with a door and a toilet we still need to use to work around. It would have been heaps easier if the toilet had been taken out already but no, unfortunately, and that’s why it’s called preparation I guess.
The bathroom was a slightly different matter, and quite the curve ball. All up though - probably about 8-10 hours. The bathroom seems for some reason to be in much worse condition than other rooms in the house. It all started off okay, and I was hopeful that we would be able to polish as planned. However, it was not to be - there are a couple of holes in the actual floor, plus a few sections with old checkerboard lino stuck to them and…half of it is chipboard.
Darren has his theories about how the original bathroom was - with a bath along one wall where the washing machine and shower are now - which he gleans from the treatment of the far wall and now, the floor. When the bath was removed we figure that the floor probably had rotted or otherwise they couldn’t remove it without removing the floor boards. Instead of putting it back together with real floorboards, they stuck chipboard down instead. GUH.
Luckily by this time we are troopers. We always try to figure out our options before we do things because this house has curve balls - and this is the reason we try to do our renovations to a high standard. Whether it is us doing this stuff next time or someone else, it’s a great reason to actually do things the good way. We considered getting boards from a demolition yard, but a friend advised us that they can often be in bad nick and weird sizes. Since we’d have to replace two that have holes in them at the moment and the half that need to cover where the chipboard is, it could end up being worse than just tiling.
Off to the tile shop again we went! We have chosen our tiles carefully to match as closely in wall colour as we can to our paint colours. The main worry now was that they might not have enough tiles for us to get so that the base of the shower and the floor can be the same tile. Thankfully they did and we ordered them on the spot. It is one awesome thing about decorating a small space - you can be sure that the unexpected isn’t going to cost as much as it might have.
Now we pretty much wait for it to be bathroom renovation time. The bathroom people are coming the week after Easter and will hit straight into the demolition of the existing stuff - even if the floor under the current shower tray is water-damaged we can just patch it up and keep going.