Home

What Lies Beneath, Part Two

You know that hashtag on Instagram #ihavethisthingwithfloors? If you don’t, look it up.  There are some incredibly pretty floors out there. I could scroll through the photos for hours.

Well, anyway, I actually do have this thing with floors, in particular the laminate floors in my house. When we moved in, we hadn’t the time, money or energy to go pulling them up and replacing them. So we left them.

I’ve mentioned before in a previous post that I suspect there are nice tiles underneath the hall laminate. I was dying to rip up the laminate and check. The Bavarian was not. What if there were broken tiles underneath? Or just cement? We’d need to fork out for a new floor all because of my curiousity. We shelved the idea.

Then along came our dog. She’s black and loses a lot of hair. The laminate is pale. Every singe hair she loses is plainly visible on the laminate. For a while there I wasn’t what you’d call her biggest fan. Until, that was, The Bavarian suggested we get a new floor in the hall.

A new floor! That would involve puling up the laminate. That would mean seeing what lies beneath. The excitement began to bubble up in me. I love our dog. She’s the best thing ever.

img_20161022_115058
The laminate looks ok here but up close it was stained and very hard to keep clean

Today The Bavarian ripped out the laminate. It only took 35 minutes to rip it all up. I gathered and binned the bits as he ripped them out. Within an hour all the mess was gone and we had an new old floor.

img_20161022_122053

The previous owners had, very thoughtfully, put plastic filma and padding over the tiles and under the laminate, so there was no glue to scrape away and there was no damage to the tiles. They are all intact.

img_20161022_142528

I had been hoping for a pretty pattern, but since the house was built as a working class semi in the 1950s, not a prosperous time in Germany, there was little chance of that being the case.

We’re happy with the tiles as they are. It feels like we’ve reclaimed a little bit of the history of the house. They belong here. The laminate didn’t. We’ve just one little problem to deal with.

img_20161022_142509

img_20161022_142706

The old entrance to the house is now part of the hall. That means the tiles end and the first section of the hall inside the front door is cement. We need to find a solution for this area. Tile it with a pattern? Paint it? Get it polished? It looks like I’ll be having this thing with things with floors for a while yet, in a good way.

All tips gratefully accepted, by the way, so leave me a comment with your opinion.

20 thoughts on “What Lies Beneath, Part Two

  1. Oh how fab to find those and in such great condition under the laminate! We’ve been gradually ripping up carpets or laminate, sadly though nothing is in good enough condition so far to try and restore. Perhaps the patch of cement is the place to try some patterned tiles, exciting to have an option there for something different X #HomeEtc

    1. Exactly. The dog was the catalyst, most defintely. I’m convinced now after a couple of weeks of this floor that I want a tiled pattern on the cement section. Deciding on the colour scheme is the next challenge 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.