Christmas Break

I probably won't post for a while with the holidays and all, but I wanted to show you what we finished up last night:

From the door

Toward the door

With the rug we got for it

And finally

What it looked like when we started.

I think we made an improvement.

Thanks for reading and Merry Christmas, everyone!

Connect Floor

The title may be a bit of a stretch. I've done so many posts on flooring now, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything clever. So in that vein, here's another!

The underlayment went in pretty easily. We tacked it down all around, which we won't be doing in the future. The reason is that it seems to start bubbling and crumpling and stuff on us when we do that. What we're going to do from now on is to lay it out, cut it a little long, and tack it at the end of the room where we're starting. As we go, we'll push the excess out and eventually just cut it off of the end. That should resolve some issues, hopefully.

Not sure what we're doing here, but I'm sure we're working hard.

Confirming that our guides are square.

First row! This room is going so much faster than the previous room. We've gotten more comfortable with the tools of the trade and we've learned what we need to freak out about and what we can let slide.

Working our way out. The wood we chose seems to go beautifully with all of our wall colors.

Bit of a break. So I went into the basement and garage and pulled out all the actual trash that needs to go to the dump. Old toilets, destroyed doors, giant cardboard boxes full of styrofoam, etc. All will be going to the recycling part of the landfill or the trash area. The basement is like 10x bigger with all this junk out of there. It has enough room now in the main room to hold all the junk that was sitting in the front room for weeks on end. Everything is really coming together.

Part of the dump trip was tearing out all the remaining carpet. The stairs were a pain, but look so much better even with just bare wood. A coat or two of primer and they'll look downright snazzy.

The upstairs hallway looks better now, too. Really, getting that horrible carpet out of my house was the most important thing of all. It smelled and just made everything gross.

Back to the floor!

As we finish more floor, there's less and less floor on which to store our crap. So we had to transfer back into the room.

This was the hardest cut so far in this room. Why didn't we start in here, again?

And that's about where we left off last night.

Here are some extraneous pictures of the house:

That's pretty snazzy, I must say. Many thanks to my mom and my wife for cleaning and organizing in here!

Here's our mantel with stockings and all. The J and J stockings you can probably figure out, and A is for my brother-in-law. But what about that fluffy pink W stocking, you might ask? That belongs to this one:

Her name is Winifred and she's pretty much taken over our whole life. She's adorable, as you can see, and is just a bundle of puppy-style energy. She's having a great time with grandma and grandpa coming over to help with the house, but I bet she'll be happier still when mommy and daddy can relax on the couch with her some nights again.

Thanks for reading!

Clean Sweep

Well, we got everything moved into the new room, so now it looks like this:

Super cute! The wood floor is really nice, and this room is so much warmer than the Colonial Room for some reason.

We're finally getting almost the last of this hideous carpet out of our house! The only carpet left after this room is the hallway upstairs and the staircase. That will probably take a little longer.

We're getting much better at this now. It doesn't take long at all to gut a room anymore.

Gross. You can tell where the seams in the carpet pad were because that's where all the nasty stains actually got to the subfloor.

DEAL WITH IT.

This is the debut of the Back-Pacuum, which I'm pretty fond of. I can't help but think that it might work a little better if it hadn't been left outside to rot all winter, but whatever.

And there's the floor with a coat of Killz on it. I'm going to do another coat tonight, then tomorrow will be underlayment time.

Thanks for reading!

Yar, ye be walkin' the plank

So we've put in more work on the office floor over the past few days. Here's what has come of it:

We have a few weird-ish areas around the door and closet, but thankfully they were close enough to 45º that we could cut them without too much difficulty.

We're sneaking up on the closet wall here. Thankfully we've already undercut the door frame, so it was pretty easy to get the flooring underneath it.

We are definitely running out of space to keep our tools!

This was lucky. One of our boards fit perfectly so the end of it came right to the corner there on the left. If it hadn't, getting the board cut and fitting properly would have been pretty rough. Sometimes things just go your way.

We decided to finish out the entry first and then go back and fill in the closet.

So close now!

We had to rip a short board here. The walls aren't really straight, either in the horizontal plane or the vertical, so getting the wood to match was pretty tough.

Woo-hoo!

This was one of the tougher pieces, but the template we built for the underlayment really helped a ton. I'm never doing a project like this without templates again. It took a while to make, but it saved so much time and material later on.

Slowly filling in the closet.

We're to the point now where the nailer won't fit anymore, so we're drilling and nailing through the tongue.

Last row!

My finest moment. Ladies (and certain gentlemen) this is what you've been waiting for. First off, this is the last board in this room. Second, you can see my very cool little hat light. It's my normal flashlight I carry every day, but the clip can turn around to be used like this. It was incredibly handy. I suppose the fact that almost my entire hind end is hanging out of my pants might appeal to some as well. Mostly my wife.

All done!

Look how pretty! The foamy underlayment in here makes a huge difference. Walking around on the bare subfloor was incredibly loud and echoy. Echoey? I have no idea. It echoed a lot. In here now, everything is much quieter. Louder than on carpet, for sure, but very reasonable.

This is what success looks like.

With this room done, we're on to the colonial room! I'll keep you posted on progress there as well. Thanks for reading!

It's not a retreat, it's an advance to the rear

Well, after my last post, you may have thought that I was pretty well decided that I was going to do exactly whatever I felt like regarding the direction of my wood flooring. I really was. I had convinced myself that I knew better, and even talked to the wood floor guy at Floor & Decor and he said that with thinner engineered flooring the direction isn't quite as important. Somehow, despite all of that, despite my diagrams and my logical arguments and all the rest, I still decided in the end that going across the joists was better. Why? Because I really hate being proven wrong, especially when it's going to cost me weeks of labor and thousands of dollars. If I do the floors perpendicular to the joists, I have every reason to believe that they will last a long time and look great, which would justify the investment. If I do them parallel, they may look great, but they may start to sag and look lame after 5 years. I may not understand how it works and it may never happen. It could be that all my thinking and diagrams are totally accurate.However, I would be taking my own logic above the experience and knowledge of a buttload of people who install wood floors for a living, which is probably not a great idea.

So anyway, that's what happened. Here's how it progressed:

We did the lining up right this time. The way to do it properly is to measure each wall and mark the centers. Then draw lines across the room from each pair of opposing walls, giving you a cross in the middle of the floor. That is the actual center of the room. Because houses are rarely square, you may not have the same measurements. Ours were off by about 1/2" or so. We adjusted the wood at the far end to allow for that, and made sure that the boards lined up perfectly with our center line of the room. Once we got our first row in, it got much easier from there.

As an additional holding measure, we drilled and nailed through the tongue even on the boards we face nailed for the first row. The second row we only drilled and nailed through the tongue, and then we could use the pneumatic nailer.

Here's me tap-tap-tapping everything into place. We got the boards very nice and tight together. I've checked almost every seam in the room and I think there's one where I can fit my thumbnail into it. Everything else is pretty much perfect.

Have to leave this open.

There's the nailer that Erick kindly let us borrow for the project.

This is where we stopped Saturday. The boards on top are the next ones we picked to finish the row. They won't live there forever or anything.

Making progress.

Slowly creeping up on the halfway point...

There is now more floor in the room than not-floor.

I really love the color of this floor. It looks a little more red in the pictures than it does in real life, but it's just so warm and homey.

And here's where we ended on Sunday. We were exhausted and ended before we had to worry about any complicated cuts or anything.

Here are some teasers:

That's what it will look like with the wood floor and the baseboards installed. I think the color of the wood and the walls is really set off perfectly with the bright white woodwork.If all goes according to our worst-case plan, we should have the office 100% done by Wednesday night, including baseboards. We'll see, though. Worst case plans have a way of being underestimated. As we have learned many times, your worst case can always get worse.

So there you have it. We're going to have a few actually complete rooms soon. It's sort of amazing to be getting to this point now. Thanks for reading!