It’s been another eventful week over here at the new duplex.  Last week, we demo’d the majority of the house except for the kitchen and bathroom.  This time around, our target was the kitchen.  What we found in there was even worse than the rest of the house!  I’m hoping there’s going to be an end to these terrible surprises soon, but I’m not holding my breath.

We’ll start here with a quick glance at what our kitchen looked like before we started ripping everything apart.

The first thing we did was take out the old cabinets and counters.  Here’s what we discovered.

You see that dark stuff in the shape of the top cabinets?  Roach poo.  All of it.  I lost my appetite for a few days, along with my excitement about this house.

Once the cabinets were done, we took out the wall that was previously there for a pantry.  Our plan is to use part of that space for a half bath because there’s only one bathroom in the house, and it’s on the second floor.  We needed to get rid of the wall so we could reconfigure the space the way we wanted to.

Good thing we removed the wall, because we discovered a leaky pipe that had been wreaking havoc for years.  The evidence was in the floors, which we started next. And that, my friends, is when it got REAL.

We expected to remove 1-2 layers of old flooring, but it turned out to be more like 4-5.  And right in the middle of all those layers was a whooole bunch of black mold.  Yeah, the bad kind.

Before doing anything else, we called a pro and explained our situation.  They said that black mold is toxic, but is possible to go the DIY route because it can be killed with bleach on non-porous surfaces.  They said we would need to wear respirator masks and something that covers our whole body, because if the spores get into our system they can cause problems.  Lots of other articles online suggested the same, so that’s what we did.  (Remember, we’re not pro’s!  We aren’t claiming to be right, and you should always do your own research before diving into something serious like black mold!)

We bought spray bottles (the professional kid is worth every penny!), bleach, full body suits, gloves, respirators, and tarps to seal off the openings into the dining room.  We mixed the bleach with water (50/50), and put a box fan in one of the windows to blow the air outside, so any runaway spores would be forced to leave.

We first sprayed the floor while it was still intact, then sprayed each piece as we took it up.  Once they were thoroughly doused, we put all of the moldy floor pieces in a black trash bag and sprayed again just to be safe.

It took us about half a day, but we finally got to the bottom layer.

All of our mold evidence was now gone (phew!). We weren’t sure if we should leave the subfloor intact or take it all up and start fresh.  We decided to just get rid of it, because based on the way things were going, we’d probably find something else that needed to be addressed.

As it turns out, that kitchen floor was holding the majority of the smell that was spreading through the entire house!  When we came into the house the day after taking the floor out, it was noticeably better.  That made me happy.

Bryan has been working on reconstructing the floor so we can get our kitchen up and running in the next few weeks.  I would say he’s made some progress, right? 🙂  

This past weekend, we finalized our floor plan for the kitchen, started building some walls, and uncovered a surprise that is actually good!  We’ll share more photos and drawings soon.