As you can see on the floorplan over there –> there’s a small nook (mud room) you go through to get to the garage from the kitchen. At one time we thought about turning it into a 1/2 bath, but it makes a nice (albeit small) home office and Haley wants to keep using it as such. No problem, right? Riiight.
We’ve always kind of assumed that a previous owner took a chunk out of the garage to make the space and that appears to be the case. No problem. BUT the garage floor is about 8″ lower than the floor in the kitchen and we wondered how they raised it up to match. Well, I found out. After removing the ceramic tile, there was cement board. The cement board was very securely fastened (glued & screwed) to what looked to be plywood. I scraped, but I wasn’t able to totally remove the adhesive from the plywood and since the new VCT requires an absolutely smooth surface (imperfections will show up on the finished floor) I was advised by a flooring guy to remove the plywood and put down a new sheet on the floorboards. No problem, right? Riiiight.
It would have been easy… if there were floorboards. There aren’t. Nope, just 2×6 boards put together like mini floor joists without the tongue & groove floorboards. Actually, it was very solid, so I’ll probably just replace it with smooth plywood, but it’s kind of a pain because the door threshold is on top of it. As was the sheetrock.
There were also remnants of mice under there. Surprise! Actually it was extremely gross because there were drippings, nests, dead mice… the works. I’m very weary of dealing with mice remains and re-doing half-hearted attempts at rodent proofing the house. I’ll spare you pictures this time, but let’s just say I did a few more full body shutters. Really really gross.
Electrical. Hmmm…. yeah. I don’t know why they didn’t just run those three conduit lines over where the rest of the wiring accesses the crawlspace. Seems like it would have been easier than bashing two holes in the wall. Luckily for me those holes will be hidden inside a cabinet, but yeah, I have to figure out a way to mouse-proof this area. So I made a template from a Pepsi box and will cut out a piece from plywood and totally seal things off with plenty of that spray foam stuff. And maybe steel wool. And mice poison. And maybe a cat. sheesh!
Since I started this post, I’ve cleaned out all the icky stuff, sealed off the electrical stuff, put in new plywood “floorboards” and topped it off with 1 1/16″ tongue & groove plywood subfloor. Everything is solid and it’s going to have to be one very determined mouse to find a way into the house.
