Yesterday was our second trip to the cottage for more interior renovations. We removed all of the old linoleum and carpeting and spent most of the day on our hands and knees removing hundreds of nails. When I woke up this morning I could feel my knees buckle.

I assume people put layers upon layers of flooring over these pine floors in an attempt to keep the place warm in the winter, I just don’t understand why someone would go trigger happy with a nail gun to keep the linoleum in place.

This is about a quarter of one room finished.

You can start to see potential for some beautiful grain, next week we’re going to rent a belt sander to get rid of this excess gunk on the floor.

We got a bit excited and starting working on removing the kitchen tiles, something we weren’t sure if we wanted to remove.

It was by brute force the flooring was removed and by far the least enjoyable job we have done since starting. Not only did we have to remove the ceramic tiles, we also had to remove a layer of linoleum which was nailed to a sheet of plywood which was nailed to the floor with a million nails.

Originally I was considering putting in a whole new kitchen, specifically a free standing kitchen to make it less formal and more of a working cottage kitchen with open shelves, and racks for hanging pots and pans. After taking some measurements and mentally placing the kitchen I had in mind I realized my vision just wasn’t going to work. The space was too cramped.

The white kitchen cabinets already in the space are non-offensive, and even though I might have laid out the kitchen differently, the amount of closed cupboard space is very generous. The decision is to replace the tired blue counter-tops with wood and install the white ceramic sink from our old apartment. We’ve already done some updating by replacing the colourful fish hardware with nice simple black and white knobs from IKEA.

Still lots of work to do, we need to replace the office style drop ceiling with pine slats.

Here is that sun room again which we are going to paint the floors white to differentiate from the rest of the cottage. I guess someone else had the same idea because when we lifted up the floor we discovered it had already been painted. Hopefully with a good mop job, we might only have to add a top coat of white porch paint to clean it up.