Search Results for: "floor project from hell"

Floor Project From Hell V: The Stain in the Hall

Posted on by
Reply
Stained Quarter Round

David installed the white-painted shoe molding earlier this afternoon, and even got through the angsty moments trying to get the floor brackets for the closet doors re-installed. Now all that remains is the quarter-round. We’d had a bad time with the oak trim that came with the floor product (actually, it was quite expensive) as it was such dense, hard wood that no matter how we pre-drilled and pounded and used an electric nailer, we couldn’t get the nails to go in all the way. So we regrouped, bought plain pine and it’s now all cut and mitred to fit the room precisely, and as of right now it’s in the front hall with the first coat of stain on it. I’ll give it another hour and then put a second coat on it. It’ll dry overnight, then tomorrow night a coat of urethane (which we already have on hand) and Tuesday we should be installing it.

Once over the wittering we had to do over the floor bracket, David got his DIY mojo working and the baseboards are very neatly installed. He likes the power nailer, which certainly made the job a lot faster and easier. Soon I’ll be getting some bookshelves for the room, and will probably set up my laptop up there along with the lounge chair and reading lamp.

Floor Project From Hell IV: Welcome To Purgatory

Posted on by
4

Here’s a quick update on the Floor Project From Hell:

We’re almost done! Except we’ve had scope creep! We started laying out the floor after it acclimated on Friday. It’s now Monday; yes, we’re slow, but we hit a minor snag and we’re now setting up for a big finish. Which involves totally repainting the room in a slightly darker color. I’d gone through hell patching about a zillion screw-anchor holes in that room 5 years ago – but there were a couple of dings and places I hadn’t done a very good job.

First of all, we knew we needed some “approved glue product” for one board we had had to rip in half in the doorway, and for the eventual gluing of the last row of ripped boards. This was not carried by Lowe’s but they offered to order it for us. We went across the street to Home Despot to see if they carried the glue. Nope, but a very helpful woman named Chris called Bruce Flooring to find out exactly what the “approved glue product” was (actually, it’s “Bruce Everseal Adhesive“) and determined that they could get it for us… in a week. Or, we could take our chances with another brand, but our warranty might be voided if something went wrong and it ruined the floor along the one edge.

AUGH!!

So while on our way to Menard’s to check to see if they had the glue (and also buy something else unrelated to the project), I called iFloors up in Palatine. Remember the weird storefront? I’d seen some glue in bottles near the door and wondered, since they carried the Bruce Foldamp;Lock, if they also carried the glue. I spoke to a very helpful guy named Larry, who regretfully informed me that they didn’t have any Bruce Everseal Adhesive in stock, and wouldn’t be able to get it delivered until Monday. However, if I could get to his wholesaler in Elk Grove Village within an hour, we could order it from Larry over the phone, and pick it up ourselves with a reference number.

HUZZAH!! WIN!

So I gave Larry a credit card number, and he emailed me back the reference number, which I got on my iPhone will sitting in the parking lot of Menard’s… where David was picking up something or other for the project.

As it turned out, I ended up driving to Elk Grove to get the glue while David went home to get more done. I found my way to a huge, huge warehouse with a little tiny “Customer Pickup” lobby, gave the reference number, and presently a teenage guy in a black Goth T-Shirt brought me my one 16 oz. bottle of glue. I drove away exulting. After farting around for a while, we got the one short, ripped board in place; all that was necessary was to shave down part of the locking edge, run a bead of glue, and slip it into place with the 1/2″ of clearance from the wall that it required. It’ll be much the same when we get the very last row ripped, shaved, and glued.

So we continued, off and on, laying floor Saturday and Sunday. It went into place pretty well and didn’t take that much effort to install; “tapping” really was just tapping with the block and rubber mallet. I didn’t go to church in the morning, feeling 1) tired and 2) like I didn’t want to burn half the day. So since I wasn’t going, David and I went to Walker Brothers for a really solid breakfast before starting in again.

There was one bit where I thought I’d put in boards fairly tightly, but there was a huge gap at the ends of two boards. No problem, though! The floor came back up easily, I kept the rows in order, and I relaid the 4 rows or so back to the place where the gap was. It was somewhere around Saturday afternoon that we realized that the final row of boards was “short.” In more ways than one.

The last two rows were from a box that had mostly shorter pieces and only 1 long piece; the product comes in “random lengths” which means you don’t have to make as many cuts and can break up the “line” a little so the joints don’t line up too closely. It was with some gnashing of teeth and not a little wailing that we found that not only was the very last row all short, choppy boards and requiring a rip-cut to fit in the space, the last row was short by just TWO LONGISH BOARDS. The waste material from the ripped boards would have fit in the space remaining… we just estimated it a little too closely. It turns out that if we’d chosen the 3″ width instead of the 5″ width, we might not have had to rip the last row, and wouldn’t have needed the 6th box.

Oooooo, burn!

So it was back to Lowe’s we went on Sunday afternoon for one more box of Bruce Fold;ampLock Gunstock flooring. While there, we also bought matching quarter-round (reasoning that at this point, we don’t want to mess with staining pine to match) and also some MDF shoe moulding with a nice detailed edge, because some of the 1/2″ expansion gaps we had to leave around the edges of the floating floor were more like 3/4″ gaps. The shoe moulding was pre-primed; we also bought white trim paint in a satin finish, and two gallons of a kind of deep salmony color for the walls. Yes, I had previously painted in there with a friend. But the shade was a little bit too pink, and there were some places where the walls had gotten gouged in the ensuing years, and in the course of laying the floor there were a couple of places around the closet door that got messed up, so we decided to paint again.

So last night I set up the shoe moulding on a couple of sawhorses that we bought, and put the first coat of paint on it.

Hurrah for scope creep!

Today being Monday, we farted around for a while. I put a second coat of white paint on the shoe moulding, and a first coat on the one piece that was somehow still up in the room (I thought David had brought it all down, he thought I brought all of it down). Then it was two trips to Menard’s to get painting supplies that we either knew we had on hand, or in the case of the second trip, thought we had on hand. We also got a countersink and previously bought finishing nails the other day at Lowe’s.

Yes, we’re a little… disorganized… in the way we approach home repair.

There has been a little snarling while setting up to do the paint job; we’d considered painting first so we don’t have to worry about getting stuff on the new floor and finick around with tape-down drop sheets and cloths to keep the step ladder from denting the floor. David’s dealing with some issues in the closet, which had never been painted and needed a lot of Kilz and spackle to bring it up to paintable. I’m recovering from a hissy I was about to have over putting the self-taping plastic drop cloth stuff on the walls where I’m going to start cutting in and painting. I’m hoping to be able to reuse the short bits of pre-tape stuff, about 18″ wide, as I go along the walls. I found pretty quickly that ripping off an arms’-length strip of the stuff resulted in a twisted, stuck-together mess.

Afternoon is not a good time for either of us to be frustrated – this at least we both recognize and sometimes we just have to down tools and walk away for a bit. However, once the fiddly prep stage is over with, the “color going on the walls” stage will go well enough.

Tomorrow after a second coat, we can finally lay the final two rows of boards (which need 48 hours in the room to acclimate), install the moulding, re-install the closet doors, and call it done.

Then I’ll find an inexpensive Persian-style rug, get Mom’s recliner up there, and David will install some shelves (or we’ll find some bookcases). I’ve got some lamps (a floor lamp plus a matching table lamp) and it’ll become a little library/reading room. But whatever goes in there, it’ll finally be a room again.

In the course of this project, we’ve made numerous trips to home improvement centers. We’ve bought and returned and re-bought an entire flooring system and a compound mitre saw. The first flooring system was the bamboo stuff, already described as undocumented and dicey. The first compound mitre saw was a Craftsman 10″ but David decided he could make do with a kind of complicated clamp setup so he could use a circular saw he borrowed from his dad. It was workable, but time-consuming and the cuts weren’t that good, so he went back and got a Craftsman 10″ sliding compound mitre saw. He was originally going to get a 7″, but it wasn’t in stock and he texted me that he was getting the bigger saw after all. “Oh well, ruh ruh ruh!” I texted back, and it really has made the latter part of the floor cuts go like a dream, and of course he worked out the mitred cuts for the shoe moulding and got it dry-fitted. The saw is in the garage, so he worked out several cuts at a time, carefully. It’s overkill, of course, but we’ve talked about redoing the floors in the other two bedrooms, and there are other projects we’ve talked about, too.

Later: David did the cutting-in in the closet, and then felt the need to escape to the health club. So I took over and finished painting in there, not without some angsty moments and strangled howls. The doors have been sitting in the garage for years… I originally took them out so it was easier to paint the first time. It was rather horrible painting in the closet, because of the angles and having a lot of corners and sides to paint, and my hand kept cramping up. I just painted the walls with one coat, and I may not go in and put in a second coat. I don’t care, I kept saying, because it’s in the closet.

The ceiling? I don’t care if my dearest love cut in onto the ceiling. I’m not painting the ceiling.

It’s In. The. Closet.

And I don’t care if you can see brushstrokes and patchiness and the occasional fibre from my big paintbrush, because It’s. In. The. Closet.

It looks like we finish painting tomorrow – once we get over the wittering period when we lay out the tape-on drop cloths and then the larger canvas drop cloth and cut in, the rolling part actually goes pretty fast. Once the moulding and closet doors are back in place, it’ll be a room again.

We’ll be heading out to see about dinner; I had put some chicken David was defrosting in a marinade with wine and honey mustard, but David now says he has a taste for Italian food. What the hey! We’re on staycation! Chicken can marinate overnight, it’ll be yummy tomorrow.

I may marinate myself a little, too. Mmmm, wiiiiiine.

Floor Project From Hell III: Payback Time

Posted on by
3

Hey, remember that floor project I’ve left unfinished for about, oh, four or five years?

Well, this week and next week, we’re on our “staycation.” I get about 6 weeks of vacation a year, and this was the only time I could fit a two-week block in before the end of the year. And so we had decided that since we just did a big trip to England and Ireland (which I haven’t really blogged much about, but we did have a truly awesome time), we would not go anywhere and stay home, doing projects.

One of which would be the dreaded “Floor Project from Hell.” David had carried on with it once or twice and it was literally at the last, last, last stage: all that was needed was to rip the last row of boards edgewise and “pull” them into place up against the next to last row. But he couldn’t really figure out how to do that without ruining the edge of the board, because the “pressure sensitive” glue on the tongue side was completely dried out by then (years after I started the project) and his attempts convinced him it couldn’t be done.

So the room sat empty, with a few odds and ends of tools and lamps and unused crap from other rooms.

Until Monday, that is, when we had the anarchic joy of ripping it all out so we could start the project over with a different product, which we’d ordered through Lowe’s. As far as we could make out from the display rack, it was a company called US Floors, which seems to be these guys. But when we picked up the boxes at Lowe’s a couple of days later, they were just “no-name” white boxes with the color and size specs on a label at one end, and a funny-looking taped-on tag in Chinese that was probably a shipping label of some kind. We had this idea, you see, of using a “green” or environmentally friendly, renewable-resource kind of flooring product.

Oh. Boy. Was. That. A. Mistake.

Fortunately, we balked before we actually put any time into trying to install it. For one thing, there was absolutely no installation brochure in the the box we opened, and rather than open all of them and empty them, looking for an envelope that should have been sitting on top of the first board. And for another thing, that “no-name,” featureless white box had really put us off. I sent an email off to what looked like the right manufacturer’s email address asking for more installation information. After looking around online for installation instructions (we wanted to use the method for a glued-together floating floor) we gave up and took the whole mess back to Lowe’s for a refund. The next day, I got an email response from US Flooring, giving us the wrong installation information. So that was a bust, and we spent yesterday in a fruitless search for other brands of either bamboo or hardwood floors.

We went to Lumber Liquidators, which was a bust, because their support of NPR, Car Talk, and public radio notwithstanding, we could tell that their primary market was contractors and serious rehabbers, not inexperienced DIY’ers like ourselves.

Then we went to this really weird outfit called iFloor.com, which kept coming up in my Google searches. They had a location in Palatine, so we drove up there. Another bust – it was in a funky little stripmall not far from where we used to live – David remarked it was our “old stomping grounds.” And when we walked in, it was two people in a bare storefront, staring intently at computer screens, with the bare minimum of racks of flooring samples standing in the middle of the room, or against the shabby, dirty walls. It literally looked like a fly-by-night joint; they could throw the samples in the back of a truck in a couple of hours and be gone, leaving nothing but damaged walls and gouged floors behind them. Brr! Creepy. But we started looking at other products and coming around to the idea of an oak engineered floor, after looking at more samples there. They didn’t have much in the way of bamboo either, and their knowledge of the product was about as sketchy as what we’d found online, or at Lowe’s.

Wish I’d found the info at HardwoodInstaller.com earlier.

After lunch at Olive Garden (gah! must women who lunch scream at their table partners so?) we returned home empty handed and discouraged. David wasn’t keen on continuing with the project idea, but then started talking about doing all three upstairs rooms. Whoa, well, now, let’s see if we can complete one small room first, as a proof of concept, with the easiest method we can find.

So we came around to the idea of “locking” or click-installation engineered hardwood. Decided to go back to Lowe’s (not Home Depot) and just take another look. And they had their DIY-grade Bruce Lockamp;Fold flooring available in several colors and two different widths. After talking it over, we went with the Gunstock color, which is kind of a not-quite red oak kind of color. We wish it had a thicker hardwood layer, but after the 2-day acclimation period, we’ll tidy up the underlayment, get out the spacer shims, and lay a couple of rows to see if it hangs together or not. Reportedly it, too, requires a “light tap” with a tapping block and rubber mallet. There’s a video online. We feel like we have more confidence because it’s a name brand, and also it’s a US-made product. We’ll see how it goes on Friday.

UPDATE: It’s now Monday, and it’s gone pretty well! We’d be closer to completely done if we hadn’t come up short (literally) on the number of planks we needed.

Back To Hell | And So It Begins

Posted on by
2

Tomorrow at 9am, the guy comes to install the ceiling fans in the two “guest” bedrooms. Here’s the pictorial story so far:

Flickr

We load up on a thousand dollars’ worth of flooring, the same color and brand of “lock & fold” engineered stuff that finally saved the day on the original Floor Project from Hell.

This time, we’ve also bought the pine quarter round, and bought an undercut saw, because last time we learned that the pre-finished quarter round that’s part of the flooring system was made of some kind of densely impenetrable wood that our pneumatic brad nailer couldn’t handle. The pine came out fine, and I learned a few things about sanding and staining, while David learned how to use the mitre/chop saw we also bought as part of the “we’ve got to salvage our pride and get this damn project done” process. We also have the big bottle of special glue, which was used on exactly 1 run of ripped boards right at the end, and also in the closet a little. Last time, at least during the week or 10 days that it took to finally get it done, we must have made half a dozen trips to one of 3 home improvement stores in the area. Oh – and we also bought a quart of stain, and a quart of polyurethane, rather than do like we did before and buy stuff as we realized we needed it. Got staining pads and the underlayment stuff that the floor floats on, too.

Flickr

Behold the “guest bedroom,” which has become a complete tip, full of unseasonal clothing, travel bags full of snorkel stuff and Hawaiian sand, some unwanted bedclothes, and discarded junk from the painting job in the smaller room.

We actually would like to have a “guest bedroom” for something called “guests.” It would remain a cat-free zone. And along with that, we’d like the smaller room to become useable space, and not the unsorted laundry version of the Dead Letter Office. I’m toying with the idea of moving my computer(s) up there, but at the least it’s supposed to become a cozy little reading room.

Flickr

The front hall is suddenly full of DIY loot, plunder, and booty. And fans.

Yesterday we also brought home about $425 worth of ceiling fans, after a rather stressful sourcing expedition to the local specialty shop, Fan C Fans. It’s kind of a weird place, stuffed full of boxes stacked 8 or 10 high, with fans going overhead. And narrow little passages between the stacks of boxes, which wobble a little if you have to squeeze past someone. But the people there are very knowledgeable, and after some discussion they helped us find two fans of the right size and color and whatnot, along with lights and remotes.

Flickr

Decks cleared, ready for action

This time I’m hoping to be more organized about the work space, as it reduces stress levels all around. The hardest part of the whole job will be after the fans are installed – we have to rip up the carpet and get it hauled downstairs, and get ready to put down the underlayment. Then we have to start laying down the boards so they’re straight and tightly joined. This time, the long wall we start on has a door in it, and we start right there, so… tricky. That’s why David thought the undercut saw would be worth it. If we go on with the master bedroom project, there are 2 more doors, so it seems a reasonable outlay.

With any luck, we could have the subfloor prepped and underlayment done tomorrow. We think we have the plan of attack figured out as far as where we start from when laying the flooring, and what we’re likely to face as we get to the far wall and inside the closet. We hope it’ll go pretty quickly, and will decide when done if we want to tackle the master bedroom, and its much heavier furniture that would have to be moved out temporarily. That would be a separate trip to Loew’s for more flooring and quarter round.

Wish us luck, we’re off to storm the castle!

Fan C

Posted on by
Reply

We’re planning on using some upcoming vacation time to do some home improvement projects… yes, it’s The Floor Project From Hell: Next Generation, and theoretically The Floor Project From Hell: Back To Bed. Part of that project will be adding 2 ceiling fans in the two “guest” bedrooms (with the help of a real electrician) and so today we went around looking at fans. There’s a place in the neighborhood that actually specializes in fans, so we went there first.

Interesting experience: it’s a small stripmall store front, absolutely stuff full of stacks and stacks of boxed ceiling fans. There is the usual overhead festival of fans, too. Finally, there were a number of people in the shop looking around, and 2 or maybe 3 salespeople. We were assured that they offered just as good discount prices as “the big box” stores, with better selection of higher-end fans. Well, okay, but our needs are pretty basic; one biggish fan, probably white, for the bigger guest bedroom, which has a vaguely summer-cottage look. And one smaller fan, for the very small third bedroom that was the featured player in said Floor Project for lo these 4 or more years. In the end, once we had the right tools (nailer for baseboards, a decent “fold and lock” floor product) it ended fairly quickly. So we’re hoping the sequels won’t be quite as horrible, and today’s visit to the fan store was part of the prep for the big push.

The saleswoman at the store was very helpful, gave us gobs of catalogs and brochures, and talked about which models are the big sellers/most popular with do-it-yourselfers (or with people looking to have someone else install them like us). She also mentioned that many of the large DIY retailers were going more for “house brands” and away from the name brands such as those she carried. We nodded and smiled and tried to look knowledgeable, and then went over to one of the big box stores to compare prices.

Interestingly, she was right about the big box place not carrying all the high-end models, and the no-name house brands, and so on. But we also found a couple of lower-end models that might suit just fine, still made by the one maker we like, Hunter (one of our other existing fans is a Casablanca, and we like that too).

We left the big box place without purchasing, though, because the guy “helping” us flipped through a pricing catalog when we asked if a different color was available, and he said off-handedly that the catalog prices were 3 years out of date. Then he said that anything on the shop floor was whatever price was marked, but special orders would be whatever the current “catalog rate” was. Not too helpful, and he took umbrage when David opined that it seemed like “bait-and-switch” to him. So we eggzitted, leaving the guy to mutter something that rhymed with “switch” in our wake.

Oh, boy! We’re already starting off with a bang! This’ll be epic!

So far, what we hope to accomplish during our staycation:

  1. Empty larger guest bedroom, move items into smaller guest bedroom
  2. Rip up carpet, remove baseboards
  3. Possibly touch up ceiling paint, walls are still fine
  4. Prep subfloor, put down underlayment
  5. Lay fold-and-lock floor (same color as in small bedroom)
  6. Stain and replace baseboards and shoe molding
  7. Move furniture back into room
  8. If time remains, dismantle/move master bedroom furniture in small room
  9. Repeat items 1-7, possibly with professional painting before laying floor

We’ll see if we get to the second room. The furniture in the guest room is a LOT lighter than that in the master bedroom, so there’s a likelihood we’ll be borrowing a handtruck to move the heavier pieces temporarily into the other rooms. But if we get the guest bedroom totally done, I’ll be satisfied.

Are any humans reading this? If so, read on

Posted on by
2

Let’s face it, I have no friggin’ clue who reads this stuff, or if I have readers at this here point. I have a stats page, which I check now and then and note that “readership” seems to be going up. But when I dig into said stats, it appears that many of my readership seem to stop by for a few seconds to attempt to leave spam in the comments before leaving. Or, they’re using an image from here as an avatar at MyDumbass or PrincessMarySueFanfic.com
There are at least one or two of you, because you comment, and that’s nice. But frankly, lately there hasn’t been much to read here of any interest unless you like regurgitated news stories about irritating politicians and religious people who happen to like show tunes.
I’ll try to do better.
My husband David is in the other room, blogging his total disenchantMEHnt with the Robert Altman “A Prairie Home Companion” movie we just saw. He didn’t enjoy it except for the “dirty jokes” song with Dusty and Lefty, the old trailhands. I liked it pretty well, except for Virginia Madsen walking around looking portentious in a white trenchcoat. She’s supposed to be an Angel of Death, see, and so she walks around slowly and, theoretically, ethereally. Problem is, she moves rather awkwardly and clomps around in (unseen) high heels. So people on screen are constantly staring after her thoughtfully and somewhat apprehensively, because it’s broadly hinted that they all know exactly who and what she is, but as she’s wobbling out of frame, you hear this “clomp! clomp! clomp!” sound effect, a most un-angelic sound effect.
Or maybe that was just the Foley guy, having a little fun.
Anyway, aside from that I enjoyed it, though I probably would have liked it better if it had just been a straight-on concert show with Guy Noir and the Old Trailhands cast just as they were, as if they really existed.
Also… there didn’t seem to be a tale from Lake Woebegon, although Garrison Keillor seemed to be telling it as an aside to one or another person backstage through most of the action.
Anyway, I’ll try to do better and write more personal things, rather than impersonal things.
For instance, Mom’s desk and recliner arrive tomorrow. My sister Timmy tells me the house is mostly cleared out aside from “the basement. YUCK!” Said basement was known as “The Black Hole of Calcutta” in Mom’s lifetime. There’s a lot of fabric and sewing stuff down there, plus some odds and ends of tools and old books, none of which any of us daughters really wanted or needed. They’re up for grabs for the rest of the family, though they’ll probably end up in a yard sale.
I’m actually looking forward to having the recliner, though I’m not sure where I’ll put it. Eventually, the fabled “third bedroom” with the floor project from hell.
Speaking of PrincessMarySueFanfic.com, David and I happened to watch a couple of Star Trek: Next Gen episodes the other day that I’d never seen, and one of them played out like extremely bad MarySue fanfic, complete with an undead mostly immortal Scottish lover. The other one had Worf looking hot and irritable in a very uncomfortable and nerdy looking hat that fastened under the chin. Both were icky, each in its own special way. What I could have used was a nice politically ambiguous DS9 marathon, complete with the “Klingon Opera” episode with Worf and Jadzia. Now THAT was action!
We’re not planning anything special for the holiday here – I work tomorrow, so David’s taking delivery of the furniture. Tuesday, may go see fireworks, although most in the area take place on the 3rd. We’ll see.
In any case, more not-very-interesting but personal stuff will ensue. Stay tuned.