cimorene

We started peeling up these ancient sheets of pre-vinyl floor (they seem to be like ultrathin linoleum on felt paper) and removing the baseboards in our future craft/spare room, which I mentioned the other day contained an unwanted tiny kitchen. We needed to get the tiny cabinets out and remove the tiles from the masonry wall, which is part of the central chimney stack of the house. The tiny under-sink cabinet was originally a standard pre-plumbing 1950 washstand intended for washing dishes before running water. They moved it upstairs when they redid the kitchen cabinets sometime, I'd guess, in the 1960s or 1970s.

The cabinet was anchored to the wall and the counter was attached to the cabinet with two screws from underneath, which ought to have made it pretty easy to remove... except that Bob had also glued up the tile backsplash with a bunch of silicone under the bottom row of tiles somehow, as well as some kind of... extra-gluey mortar compared with the mortar on the rest of the tiles, which was applied in s-curves like toothpaste and not spread out. And then Bob glued the back of the aluminum counter to the bottom row of tiles with a bead of silicone about a centimeter wide. So after I'd chiseled all the other tiles off the wall and then chiseled the tops of the row that the counter was glued to out, we were able to grab the counter, twisting and pulling it up at an angle and eventually wrench it off the wall, taking the final row of tiles with it. (I guess I should be grateful to Bob for making the other tiles comparatively easy to remove...)

I think chiseling the remaining mortar off the wall is going to be painstaking and not leave the surface of the cement intact, but the surface of the cement was going to need to be fixed anyway and we have a bunch more of it to fix downstairs too. I've been planning to leave all of those walls until last, and that won't interfere with painting the other walls in the room.