Goodbye linoleum.

And now it's time to interrupt your inspiration pics for the real thing.

I laid down most of the hardie board yesterday, with the help of Jeff and Jerry. This is something that had been weighing on me considerably, because there were a lot of different ways to do it and even more ways to screw it up. The biggest problem was the old linoleum and what to do about it. In some places there were two layers of it: one brick pattern that was put down in the 90s, and underneath it was a bona-fide 60s style linoleum that probably came with the actual house. The second layer came up pretty easy, but the old stuff was apparently glued at every square inch. As we found with the bathroom tile, they really made this stuff to last back in the 60s. I was also worried about the unevenness, since there were gaps where there was no linoleum at all because cabinets previously occupied those spaces.

I gave up on pulling up the old stuff pretty quickly. That left us with the problem of how to get the hardie backer to bond to it. Jeff suggested that we use mastic glue and liberal amounts of screws, which would bond to the linoleum. Only problem is that that stuff is super expensive, and would take forever to do. And then a guy at Home Depot suggested that all you need is a little bit of liquid nail and some screws around the edge to make it bond. He was very adamant, pretty crazy, and fairly convincing. Jeff wasn't really a fan of this idea at all, and suggested the crazy guy did it that way because he wasn't actually living in the place in which he used this method. He thought that we'd eventually end up with cracked tile. Fair enough.

So we figured out a third and much more pleasing option: nails, nails, and more nails. We ended up getting a pack of 2000 barbed nails, and went to town on the boards with a nailgun. I put a nail in every space there was a cutout for one, and then some more in some spots where needed. Each board probably has at least 64 nails in it, so it's not going anywhere. For the spaces where there were gaps, we took pieces of the pulled up linoleum and put them underneath to even out the space.

Using a nailgun is pretty fun, I have to say. The work also went quickly - we were mostly done in about 90 minutes, plus around another 45 minutes just to make sure each board had enough nails in it (and waiting for the compressor to catch up, you can only put about nine nails in before it has to cut back on to catch up.)

In the pictures if you look closely, you can see the gridwork of nails. I have to say that I'm pretty pleased we came up with that solution. In the second picture, you can also see the tentative location of where the island will be (which is shorter than normal, since it doesn't have its legs on yet.) The cabinets are slowly making their way onto the walls, and tonight we'll have to go pick up a couple that were initially missing from our original order. So I'm thinking we will hopefully have all the cabinets up in the next few days. The fun part about this is that once the bottom ones are in we can have countertop people come out make a template. I am definitely looking forward to granite countertops.

But next up is tile, and I'm hoping we'll be able to pick that up from Floor & Decor sometime in the next few days. I'm actually looking forward to tackling that one, since I've been watching people lay tile on HGTV for about two months straight now. But at the same time I'm bracing myself for how much time it will take, since it is a really big space. It's times like these when life should be more like home improvement shows, where you see a person starting a job and moments later it is all finished.