Removing Sub-Baseboards

We've got a date for the new floor - October 15. That Monday, we'll have every room of the house but master bed and bath emptied out and ready to go for the tile to be ripped up and the new cement floor to be laid by Vision Concrete. They do some really beautiful work and we're very excited about finally having a floor that can be cleaned. And that isn't ungodly ugly.

Of course this means we have a lot to do around the house between now and then: prime and paint the entry; finish painting the kitchen/family room; choose colors and paint the office; remove all the baseboards and door casings. Yeah. That last one. The butt-ugly, contractor's pack moldings throughout most of the house have to be ripped out so we can replace them after the floor's done. Which in a correctly built house would mean some spot repair and touch-up of walls after ripping the molding down. In our house, it means a lot more.

See, when they built our house, it seems they didn't just use illegal day laborers for cleanup tasks, they let them do everything. Framing, plumbing, electrical, taping, painting. Hell, I'm not sure they didn't let Pedro and Paco draw up the original blueprints and do the engineering calculations for the vaulted ceilings. What I'm saying is: this house was built by functional idiots.

Today's example: the baseboards were installed before the tile floor.

Now, perhaps you don't know anything about construction. Perhaps you think that sounds reasonable. If so, perhaps you should hang out at the Home Depot weekday mornings hoping to get asked into the bed of a random pickup.

Normally, prying up baseboards is a moderately challenging and back-bending task. In this case, it's back-breaking. And when you've had holes drilled in your lamina and bits of disk material cut away, one of the things the surgeon suggests post-operatively is that you maybe not come back to see him if you can avoid it. So right now, the wife is very slowly prying up a few baseboards. She's been at it for about an hour and a half and has gotten a good section up. About twice as long as what I pulled up this morning in 30 minutes. Advantage: she won't have to put my socks and shoes on me every morning for the six weeks following surgery (again). Disadvantage: oh will she be crippled tomorrow.

This was supposed to be a productive weekend. I was supposed to complete all the painting other than the office and start the molding removal. Instead, we're hoping to have about a quarter of the baseboards (and none of the door casings) removed. Excellent.