Life at the beach means accepting the certainty that sand will find its way into every nook and cranny of your house. Well, we’ve taken that to a whole new level:
We’ve brought the beach inside in a big way. Yesterday, we were bemoaning the giant fly trap that was our house and preparing for a long war with the adhesive, armed with an angle grinder. Today, we are dancing a jig (my inner Irish) on our new sandy floors. We had seen someone on the web recommend using sand to mitigate the stickiness of vinyl adhesive, but we typically don’t take web-based advice that isn’t corroborated by someone else we know and trust. Enter my dad. When he saw the situation, he suggested the sand. Fortunately, we had an extra bag in the garage from the front porch paver project we did last year, so without further ado, we spread the sand in the kitchen, the stickiest spot, as a test. SO. MUCH. BETTER. Oh my goodness. We used a dustpan to distribute the sand and then worked the sand into the adhesive with our shoes Then we used a push broom to move the sand to the next section of floor and repeated. MIRACLE OF MIRACLES, FOLKS. Now, does the sand remove the adhesive? No, but we can actually walk on it now, which means we can actually cook in our kitchen tonight and not have to wear work boots to the bathroom. PROBLEM SOLVED.
Note that the HD PRO stripper we rented did not get up the glue and paint as hoped (and advertised…MAJOR WOMP WOMP), so we applied natural, nontoxic solvents and even resorted to Goo Gone, plus a lot of elbow grease, to try to get the sticky up, but to no avail. Oh sure, we knew the 20 year old vinyl tile and its adhesive would be a chore to remove, but man-oh-man. Arduous doesn’t even begin to describe it. The stripper did get some of the glue up, but whoever originally installed the vinyl tile before applied so much glue that the stripper couldn’t get deep enough in the sticky mire to strip down to the concrete.
The glue was also pulling up chunks of concrete with it, so we are wondering if whoever did the concrete slab didn’t use enough water, resulting in a crumbly crust, which we like on some things (apple crisp?) but not on our foundation. Good thing we were already planning on patching holes and flashing the floor. As it stands right now, our house is officially a giant fly trap. Seriously. Stand in one place for more than 1 second and your shoes are stuck fast. Try to walk, and you’ll walk out of your stuck shoes onto the most disgusting flooring ever. If you are building or remodeling your own home, please do not use horrible products like vinyl and vinyl adhesive in your house if at all possible. Bad all around. At least ours didn’t contain asbestos…and it was picked up within 2 hours of being hauled to the curb….
art and frames, we elected to go with a uniform grouping in a rectilinear arrangement around the TV, using the 12 x 12 square frames. For a couple of weeks, the frames sat empty (again), but the blankness in the well-used living room bothered me more than it had in the foyer, where no one really spends a lot of time. With no photos or photography of our own that was sized appropriately for these frames (yet), I pondered what to use instead.
I played with the arrangement a bit until I was satisfied with the balance of color, pattern, texture, etc. Now our wall is much happier, and so are we. Plus, I realized that I can easily swap the contents for different scrapbook pages for seasonal or holiday themes as desired, and I won’t feel bad about ‘replacing’ someone’s picture.
