Fixing our floors

So in our old house, Matt and I had a dream of installing a hardwood floor. Because of this, Matt did a lot of research and I mostly listened and learned by osmosis. So for those of you out there that do not have the benefit of a Matt in your life to read copious amounts about hardwood floors and then tell you about it, I thought I'd do a short primer

First, there are two different sides to every board. (Ok, for those of you keeping count there's really six sides, but assuming top and bottom are obvious, there are 4 sides left and they come in pairs, so two sides isnt' inaccurate).

First, we have the tongue sides. These sides of the boards have a small protrusion in the middle.

Which brings us to the groove side, which is a convenient mirror image of the tongue

Now, if you were starting fresh with a new floor, you'd put down the first piece, use a fancy flooring nailer to put some nails through the tongue and then slot the next board's groove over the nailed down tongue and repeat until the flooring is done. The problem here is that since we dug boards out of the floor there are some sections where the above technique doesn't work super well. Namely in the places where a single board is left by itself, because there isn't a way to fit both the tongue and groove into a board from above, such as the top slot in the picture below:

So, to be able to put a board in that slot, you have to take the bottom off the groove to be able to wedge in the tongue and then drop the board into place. Now, taking off the bottom of the groove on both sides of the board is no small feat. In fact, we bought a fancy new table saw just for this purpose and also this cool little thing that allows you to use a dremel as a router.

And then you end up with boards that look like this:

 Once you have all the pieces cut, it actually goes pretty fast. We nailed down the ones we could, and glued the rest. Here's a pic of Matt doing some gluing in the small hole in the little bedroom.

Once we were done, we left some bricks on the glued boards overnight just to be sure the glue was holding.

demo weekend - flooring

Part of the charm of old homes is that they usually have hardwood floors and ours is no exception. But unfortunately, ours aren't in super good shape. Either the dog that did so much good work on the basement carpet also found a spot or two upstairs or the previous owner was fond of plants, but not really fond of those little plastic things that keep the water in the plants from leaking down into the floor and doing some real damage.

So there were a number of spots that were just too far gone to repair:

You can see the black damage that won't sand out, no matter what we do. So the only thing for it was to rip out the boards and put in new ones. As you can guess this is an involved process cause floors don't really like to come out once they are in. The process involves drilling some holes, using a circular saw to cut lenghtwise along the board, and then some serious chiseling to get all the pieces out, carefully leaving surrounding board's tounge, groove, and surfaces untouched. 

This spot was the largest, but Matt also took out two more before we decided it would be good to stop and see how difficult it would be to put the new boards in before taking anymore out. There are still a few more spots I'd like to do, but we'll see how the repair goes over the next few days before we bite off more than we can chew. 

Here's what the first hole ended up looking like after Matt removed all the bad boards. Its a lot of work to fix one little water stain!

We also took care of another over by the wall in the living room that is coming down, and one in the corner of the little bedroom. 

I hate to say it, but I think there's one more big spot that has to come out (also in the little bedroom). This one's also a doozy, but Matt is getting speedier in his demo process.

 I bought some new wood to replace the old a few days ago and its been sitting out to acclimate to the climate and humidity in our new place. With any luck we should start fixing floors tomorrow!

Demo weekend - Front entry way

Oh boy, this is a big one. I'm super excited about this. I'm not huge on bi-level houses but this one in particular made me want to turn around as soon as we walked in the door. First there's the giant, buttend of the wall just as you walk in, and the completely sick-making faux brick linoleum.

 Add in the bars up at the top of the wall, the faux crystal chandelier, and the lack of light from all those walls covered in vinyl wall paper and you've got a very ugly, unwelcoming entry way.

So it all had to go, starting with the unnecessary wall in the entry way:

And then moving on to the wall in the living room:

You can already see how much more light is getting through. We have big plans for the railing and this wall, plus a new light and, if I get my way, a new front door. I mean, seriously, look at this barn door... so not our style:

Now I just have to convince Matt... :)

Demo weekend - coat closet

To compliment the new entryway that we are planning to put in, and to alleviate some of the lack of closet space, we decided to turn the under the stairs storage into a more functional space by turning it into a large coat closet with storage behind. It'll be sort of Narnia-esque, except that behind the coats will just be some large boxes and a cement wall instead of a whole new world.

So, like all things, you must destroy to build up, and that's where we began:

Of course, it doesn't look like much now, really just the absence of something. But just imagine it with a nice sliding door, and a long bar for hanging all our coats, and a nice set of shoe racks so that we don't have to track mud throughout the house. That plus the absence of carpet should make the whole area a lot easier to get and keep clean.

Demo weekend - basement carpet

Well, we had a very full weekend of demo at the new place thanks in large part to my parent's help :). First, we started with the carpet in the basement, which looked like it had maybe been installed when the house was built in the late 60's. 

Looks like it was also a convenient place to keep a large, perhaps incontinent dog. Pretty much the entire carpet looked like this:

And then there was the dirt under the carpet, which was astounding and especially impressive in the entryway from the garage (I mean, who puts carpet there anyway, right. All those dirty shoes for all those years... ewww).

Once we got that up, we found this lovely tile underneath (you can see more of a close up in the last picture):

Which also looks original to the house. Some, if not all of it will have to come up when we put in the new tiled entryway, but luckily, since it's so old, we tested removing some of it and it pops right up. It even leaves a really cool pattern and greeny yellow color.