Showing off

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!  My family got to spend a week up at the house for the holidays to give it a good trial run.  While we did a little bit of work, we mostly just relaxed and enjoyed being away from the TV and computer for a little bit.  I had finished one bedroom before we got there so this is where my husband and I slept:

 

During the first couple of days I focused on finishing the floor in our den.  I was able to complete all of it, including the difficult, uneven pieces around the stone fireplace.  I am sure there is a much better tool for scribing these planks, but all I had was my miter saw.  So I'm sure what I did would be a no-no in all safety manuals but it worked.  I had to get the saw going with my right hand, then lift the blade guard and hold it up with my my right thumb.  With my left hand I ran the board sideways along the spinning blade to eat away a little at a time.  When I was done the amount of particulate and burning wood smell in the house was making us all sneeze and wheeze.  Luckily we were leaving to come home for Christmas night.  By the time we returned the next day, the dust had settled and the floor looked great:

 

 

I still need to install baseboards and caulk around the fireplace but I was able to bring in the furniture.  It is amazing how much a real kitchen table and a coffee table make a house feel more comfortable!  Not to mention having a table to work a puzzle on, my specialty.  (We did two 1000 piece puzzles over the week).  As you can see, the dogs also made themselves comfortable:

 

 

By far the best part of the week was using the fireplace during the cold spells.  Here we are before I got that last row of flooring in at the fireplace:

 

All in all, the week was a success.  But we did decide that we will need to find a solution for our water quality.  Like most of the folks in the area, we have a sulfur smell to our water.  It is not a health issue, just a smell issue.  We can bring bottled water to drink, but the sulfur smell happens with each flush of the toilet and with every tooth brushing.  After a while, you smell it everywhere.  We are not sure if the solution is a holding tank that will let the sulfur gas come out before it comes to the house, to install a chlorination system, or to bite the financial bullet and switch from well water to rainwater.  Stay tuned on that one.

On to the new year!

Flooring, flooring and more flooring

I am realizing just how much flooring I have to do.  I finished the first bedroom and it came out great.  This is the smallest bedroom which is about 12 x 12.  It took about 10 hours of working to get the floor laid in there.  I used plain cedar 1x4s as the baseboards and gave them a wash of thin white paint.  In order to seal them I was going to brush on polyurethane but that seemed to take away most of the white tint.  So I bought a can of spray-on poly which did a better job.  (Although maybe I should look again after the paint high has worn off! Mental note - future baseboards should not be sprayed in the garage no matter how cold it is!)

So this bedroom is pretty much done.  I installed the basebards and caulked them, installed the curtains and put back the closet doors.  Once we move the mattress and dresser in there and install a new door, the room will be ready to go.


Now on to the main living area.  This floor installation will be done over an existing tile floor so I am floating the wood floor over it.  That means no adhesive, just gluing the planks together with a type of wood glue.  This type of flooring installation is much easier, in my opinion, because you can start and stop whenever you like.  There is no sticky adhesive all over everything and no timing concern with getting the floor laid before the adhesive sets.  However, I think the floating floor delivers a lesser final product.  Since the floor isn't attached to anything, it can get pockets that stick up a little.  That makes the floor sound and feel funny when you walk on it.  The glue-down floor feels much more solid.

This room is quite a bit bigger than the smaller bedroom.  I am starting on the longest wall which is over 35 feet long.  So far I have spent about 8 hours on it and this is as far as I have gotten.  There have been some precise cuts around two doorways that slowed me down a little and the pad that goes under the flooring has been difficult to deal with.  I am hoping things will go a little faster now.  When I do the mathmatical calculations, I have already laid more floor in this room than the bedroom, and in less time.  However, I am only about 1/4 of the way done. For someone like me who needs to see those results as a reward for hard work, this room is proving to be difficult.  And don't get me started on my aching knees and back....

Maybe I should just appreciate the ease of this glue together floor because all of the rest will be the messy adhesive kind.

Exterior Shots

I finally remembered to bring my camera with me this week to take some pictures of the exterior work that was done to the house.   Our contractor was Sheds and More and I was really happy with the work they did.




 

We still have some work to do ourselves, including staining the huge deck.  This will be a huge task since it is over 1000 square feets plus three sets of steps.  We aren't sure what color we will use yet but my husband says he wants a reddish brown.

We also need to put up the siding under the porch roof.  The current plan is to use cedar shingles for that siding but I am still trying to figure out how to install them.  Looks like some internet sites say you can just tack them to the wall, but the concern is that moisture collects behind them and makes them cup.  So the much more difficult way to install them is to put up furring strips and then tack the shingles to the strips that way there is air circulation behind the shingles.  I also think the shingles will need some type of sealer to keep their color.  My plan is to spray something on them before they go up so I don't have to deal with covering the rock. 

 

 

 

I can't wait to see the finished version - it already looks 100 times better than it did when we bought it.  Remember this unfinished rock siding?  Everyone thought we should tear it down and just put siding up on the wall.  But I think it turned out even better leaving the rock but leveling it off with a cap stone.

From top to bottom

Well, I finally finished the cedar ceiling.  I haven't posted anything new lately because I seemed to be working on the same thing over and over.  Now that it is pretty much complete, I am happy to move on to another project.  I still want to caulk where the beams meet the cedar and maybe fill in some of the finish nail holes.  But for now I am done.  I think it really warms up the room.

I still want to replace that ugly ceiling fan.  You can't see it in the picture but there is gold stencilling on the blades. But that is for another day...






So, now I am working on the new floor.  It will be an engineered hardwood that will be glued down in some areas and floating in others.  The style is a natural toned hickory which is fairly light colored with lots of variation and knots.  I am starting in the bedrooms so that I can load in some furniture soon.  I would love to sleep on a real bed instead of a twin bunk bed.  Anyway, the back bedrooms had carpet over cement foundation.  So I removed the carpet and pad, and pulled up the carpet tacks.  That left me with pits in the concrete, so I filled all of those in with patching compound.  I scraped the carpet pad glue and vacuumed all the dust.  I cut all of the trim around the doors so the flooring could run under it.

Today I started gluing down the flooring.  I have never glued down a floor so I had watched several youtube videos to get ready.  I went ahead and laid out three rows with all cuts already made so they would be ready to go once the glue was down.  I had gloves, a trowel, a chalk line, a mallet and some rages.  I was most nervous about the glue - how fast would it dry and how hard was it to clean up?  The giant can it comes in says not to let the glue come into contact with skin and to clean any glue off the floor immediately.  As the videos recommended, I struck a chalk line three rows away from the back wall and started trowelling the glue.  The glue was much thicker that I would have guessed.  It also got on everything very quickly.  It is pretty impossible to avoid getting any on the wood or your skin.  For some reason, getting the boards to fit together seemed much harder once they were sitting in the glue.  Everytime I would get a couple of boards in, the next one would push them apart.  It was very maddening.  The first three rows took a long time and had me screaming in frustration.  Finally, once these three looked good, the other rows went much faster and easier.  I am hoping that part of the problem was just learning to work with this flooring and that maybe the next room won't be so hard to start.  We'll see.  I did about 1/3 of the room before I had to leave for mom duty.  I hope to finish tomorrow.  This is an early shot.

 

 

Once I am done with the flooring in this room, I need to make a final decision about baseboards.  I am thinking about using plain cedar 1 x 4 with a light glaze.  I just make the glaze out of paint that I have that has been significantly thinned with water.  I will then coat with poly urethane.  I tried using a tan colored glaze on a sample but wasn't really happy with it.  I will try white tomorrow.  Once those baseboards are done, this room will be ready to load.  Wow, it will feel great to be done with a room.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  Back to the grind tomorrow.  I hope some of this glue will come off my skin soon :-)