The Kitchen, Days 4 and 5: The Pantry Wall Continued

These last few days have been spent dealing with the rest of the kitchen floor and finishing the pantry wall.  Underneath where the refrigerator was, in front of the pantry door, the floor had buckled due to water damage caused by a mouse chewing through the water line to the ice maker about six years ago.  Some water had seeped around the edges of the linoleum in the pantry at the time, causing water to get under the flooring.  But I thought at the time that some judicious hole-drilling would minimize that problem, and by drilling holes, most if not all of that inter-floor-layer water would drain to the crawl space and out.  Which, in fact, it did.

In and of itself, I wasn't too worried about the buckling, either, since I thought it was just the linoleum flooring that had buckled, and knew over time it would eventually lay back down flat, especially with the heat of the refrigerator on top of it.  Well, as I discovered, of course that didn't happen.  I cut into the 1980's layer of linoleum, hoping I could just do some trimming of it to get it to lay flat then cover it up with the rest of
the stick-on tiles I had from when I first covered the floor some eight years ago.  Well, below the 1980's layer is the 1970's layer of
linoleum, of which below that is a layer of thin plywood, sitting over the 1960's layer of linoleum.  (I swear every owner of this house has
added a layer of flooring in the kitchen, myself included!)  When the flood of water from the mouse-chewed water line seeped through those holes I drilled in an effort to avoid water spreading between the layers, desiring for it to just drain out, I inadvertently exposed that plywood to the water.  It buckled.  Bad.  No quick cutting and splicing here, damn it.  A few screws to "pull" it down to the subfloor won't work, either.

By the way, the main reason I didn't just pull the entire kitchen floor up when I recovered it eight years ago is simple:  Linoleum flooring prior to the early 1980s contains asbestos.  I already created a hazardous waste situation when I remodeled the bathroom
nearly ten years ago.  Back then, not knowing better, I actually pulled all five layers of flooring up in the bathroom, three layers of various linoleum, two subfloors, and a layer of 1950s Tri-Bond plastic tile (man did someone love that stuff ... it was and still is all over this house!)... I'll never forget the panic I caused my garbageman at the time when he saw a trash can full of asbestos-laden, broken-up, loosely piled ancient flooring in the can!  (Never had a garbageman knock on my door, red-faced and hysterical, shouting at me, "What the hell are you doing!?!"  Granted, he used a much stronger curse word than "hell"...)  Somewhere around here I'll have to dig up the warning letter I received from some government agency or another (can't remember which) about proper handling of hazardous waste... never had a garbageman report me to authorities before, either.  Don't ask how much of that crap I may have breathed in at the time... I don't know. Fortunately, it was a small bathroom, only 5x6 feet of flooring (five or six layers thick) was removed...

Anyway back to the kitchen floor.  I did get lucky, as the buckling ended at the plywood layer.  The 1960s and below layer weren't buckled; I would only need to deal with this one area of buckled plywood.  Unfortunately, there was no way to just screw the floor down where it was buckled, hoping to suck it down to the subfloor and level it out.  This wasn't something that I could just ignore, either, because every time I open the pantry door, it rubs the floor there and almost gets stuck.  No way to add my layer of flooring and still open the door!  Plus the pantry will be (is now) a high traffic area, so this particular buckle is noticeable, very noticeable.

Fortunately, I happen to own more power tools than most men.  A fact that has both weirdly excited and deeply disturbed more than one
boyfriend over the years.  Pulled out the handy-dandy RotoZip, cut just the plywood layer out, limiting myself to just the area that was buckled.  Placed a few decking screws here and there to reduce the lesser buckling in the area, and went to grab the bucket of self-leveling cement that I know I have out in the Garage of Doom to fill in the hole I just created so the floor isn't 1/4" lower there.

Damn it, the stuff has dried rock-solid... that bucket's been in the garage for at least six years!! It shouldn't have dried out!

Grrr... let's try some thinset mortar.  If it's good enough for ceramic tiles, it should be good enough to level out this hole... nope.  It has dried solid, too, and it's only 8 or 9 years old! Starting to regret the decision to try to get everything done using only stuff I already have on hand... *sigh*...

Well, I could use spackling paste... nah, that's not a good idea :) Not only would it take a week or longer for a 1/4" thick layer of
spackling paste to dry, it'll crack and crumble under repeated foot traffic.

Ahh hah!  The Garage of Doom does contain a solution - silicon caulking!!  Fortunately, I've got tubes of the stuff - I stocked up a few years ago when some home improvement store or another went out of business, got it for like 50 cents a tube! (Pack Rat Alert!) Of courses I can't find
the dang caulking gun, I own three of them (don't ask) and can't find a single one... but no worries.  It's not like I'm needing this to be
a nice, fine, line.  I just tore open the tube and used a putty knife to spread it out, reminding myself it doesn't need to be perfect, just needs to be good.  (I may not have inherited my mother's neatness, but I sure did inherit her  perfectionism! *grins*)  Caulking is flexible and waterproof, so it'll do the trick perfectly. Some bleach on the patches of mold (fortunately, dried and dead mold) that I exposed, and let it all dry overnight. 

Well, actually, as it turns out, it took about three days for the silicon to completely set and dry.

After the silicon dried, I put down the rest of the stick-on floor tile, actually have enough left over that I could retile the floor in the pantry.
 I think I'll stew on that for a while... if I cover the pantry floor, there will be NO extra tiles left for future repairs, should any be needed.  I think I'll leave it as a future owner option to use that spare tile for the pantry or not.

The kitchen is almost done.  I just need to clean up the mess I made doing all this work, clean the ceiling, move the table and chairs in, and it's all done and ready to go. Probably hang some sort of picture on the wall above the table, it's kinda stark looking there.  It is so decluttered, it actually ECHOs in here!