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 :-)
Wow! Hey, I hear gold scrolled ceiling fans are making a come back.
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