I spent the days working on the house. Made a big mistake, but learned a valuable lesson.

I put the second coat of polyurethane on the pantry floor last Saturday. I looked it over and things looked ok, so I decided it was time to start on the tile in the kitchen. This required me to move the refrigerator so I could pull up the old floor. My idea was to slide it to the pantry for a while. I got the frig up on the new floor, but when I turned it, I put a HUGE scratch in the floor. Apparently, it wasn’t completely dry. So I’m going to have to sand and finish a bit of the pantry floor again. This is good info for when I do the rest of the house. I need to wait a long time for it to completely dry. Here’s what it looks like now:

Lesson learned

The other thing I learned is that there is a slope between the floor in the kitchen and the dining room. I didn’t measure it, but based on the bits of wood that I pulled out from the subfloor, I’d say the difference is a little less than an inch. This is good and bad. Bad because there’s a good possibility that tile placed at the start of the slope will crack. Good because I should be able to match the height of the floor in the dining room better. I think that I’ll just have to layout my tile carefully and make sure that no tile spans across the point where the floor starts to go down. I don’t know if this is possible, but I’m going to try. Here’s how the kitchen looks after today:

Almost ready for some tile