Jackhammering's All Done

We have removed the maroon carpet in the hallway and the white tiles you can see in the foyer/cloakroom have now also been jackhammered up. We will be tiling from the front door, down the hall and through the kitchen in the same tiles.

Even though the hallway is relatively short the carpet removal took alot longer than expected. In Australia the carpet would have been held down by lengths of wood with hundred of tiny nails which grip onto the underside of the carpet and hold it in place. This wood would have been nailed to the slab. In Guernsey they do not use nails they use some type of adhesive. It works very, very well as getting the wooden strips off the concrete took a few hours whacking with a hammer and a large screwdriver. We don't own a chisel.

The tilers, on the other hand, took up all the tiles in the kitchen in less than four hours! I left for the school run and then went shopping; when I came home at lunch there was already a large waste bag full of broken tiles on the driveway and a huge mound of them in the middle of the kitchen floor.

The sink is gone now and we are washing up in a bucket which we fill up on the downstairs shower. You don't realise how often you use a sink during an average day until you don't have one.

The room looks larger somehow, now the tiles are gone. Perhaps it had something to do with the angle the tiles were originally laid.

The last of the wall tiles and the floor tiles under the cooker were removed the next day. It is amazing how quickly you can demolish a kitchen.