Ok well I was apparently too ambitious on this one. The cutback residue on the wood floors is impossible to remove without hiring someone with an industrial sander to grind it off. Since the thicknesses vary, this can and will create a totally uneven floor surface and could have sanded the floor so thin it would have caused damage. Sometimes people can steam the floor to remove the cutback, but it is laid on so thick, this option will not work for my floors.
Furthermore, there is no transition between the kitchen and the dining room. It looks almost like they did the kitchen last and laid the wood floor separate from the rest of the house. It is the same wood and it is level, but it is totally choppy where the kitchen meets the dining room. My only option now is to have new sub floor put down and install my funky, vintage salvage yard tile over that. I am sure it will turn out just fine :)
Added note: Well, poo. LOL! When the old floor was removed and the new sub floor was laid, it actually covered more surface area than the old floor. Let me explain: The old floor ended about 2 inches from the cabinetry closest to the dining room. (None of the rooms in my house are even or even perfectly square, but I will get to that in a minute). The carpet in the dining room had to be pulled back to make enough room to lay the sub floor. My friend who did this work laid the sub floor so that it met up with the actual CORNER of the kitchen - where in reality the original floor should have ended in the first place.
Now, back to the rooms not being even - when the house was built the only thing I can think is that the layout was either totally different from its present state, or the person who built it did not really know what they were doing. In my dining room, there is a double window - a double window that is not centered in the dining room. It actually encroaches into the kitchen making it very visually awkward. Not only is the window not center, but the wall that separates the house (in the kitchen) is not lined up with either the edge of the window OR the cabinets.
Back to the floor "oops" I made - since the sub floor now looks more proper it did make the surface area I need to cover larger. Sooooo, I do not have enough of my vintage tile. I was about 6 tiles short (you have got to be kidding me). I knew there would be no more of this tile because I bought all the pieces they had at the salvage yard. So, I went back this weekend to try and find something to salvage this whole project. I found tile that was the same thickness, but not even close to the same color - or even the same size. The tile I bought originally is 16X16 and the new tile I found is 12X12. So, now I had to come up with how I could make this work. The only thing I could think is that I could make a border around the whole kitchen in the new tile and use the old tile to fill in the middle.
This will either look totally cool and unique or completely stupid. I am SO UPSET that the pictures I took of the original floor and the demo were accidentally deleted from my camera. I will try and update this with pictures of the new sub floor and tile soon.
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