Continuation of a MESS...

so here we go part 2 of 2. This is only me third attempt to finish this post. Blogger has not been nice to me lately, but here goes. 

DAY 3:

So day 3 started pretty good some minor demolition which only took a few hours and I could start laying the new sub-floor. I was getting excited as my body was tired and my lungs full of dust, to get on with laying the new floor. My neighbor taped on my window and in talking with her learned she needed to borrow a ladder. I own a ladder but it is not safe for any person to be on esp. an older lady, so i decided i would go she what she was trying to do. As I was leaving the house I fell through the floor. Now it is a good thing only a leg went through cause it is a far fall to the ground and under this floor lives busted up concrete and rocks and other things that probably bite. When I stopped myself falling any further I found one leg missing and the other top side. Now I am not the most flexible guy in the world so one would think OUCH... but in reality I was more disappointed in the fact the what I was hoping to be good sub-floor was needing fixing as well. I did end up not letting my neighbor lady borrow my ladder as she would have definitely hurt herself. It was even too sketchy for me to use my ladder to help her out so I let it be.

DAY 4: 

If I am working on the house it usually begins like this: 

Randi: Hey we need to work on this!!

Justin: OK let me get what we need  

Randi: ... silence... type... type... type

Justin: 8 hrs latter tired and job done finds Randi either sleeping, playing, or on the internet

I think she should just say "you" have house stuff to work on cause that is about the only one that does work. But this blog is not to bash the wife cause I have picture proof that yes Randi is capable of helping with house stuff. Here she is with a really big pneumatic framing nailer. I am talking two hands and a tie down to use this thing and I was the one that thought she should use it... it was a long day. So after showing her how to use it and giving her the safety glasses... again long day, I prolly stopped worrying about my eyes, she went to town. One of the nice things about a pneumatic nailer is, little work, or in Randi's case double work. For some reason when I use the gun one nail comes out and when she uses the gun two nails come out. I feel really sorry for the sucker that has to pull that floor up. It is definitely not moving. But I can't complain cause she did a great job. This day was mostly laying the new OSB flooring which went rather well. The only drag here was that it snowed so I couldn't put the wood outside. I had to move everything around the room as I went so the day was a little long but non the less completed the task and was ready for real floors.

DAY 5:

This was suppose to be day 2 in the process but day 5 is better than day 6 or 7 or 8 well you get the idea. With this being Friday after the New Years Randi was back at work and I was by myself. Read day 4 again if you think this bothered me. I started my day by making a trip to the Home Depot to rent a tongue and groove nailer and pick up one piece of OSB to finish the sub-floor. I came home and was able to begin the FINAL floor. I was a little nervous as i didn't feel like screwing up some nice wood but i dove in and had a rather easy time. Our boards are 8" wide and normally they are 3" wide so the first few boards you are nailing by hand. I was able to use the T&G nailer from the first board. I was excited and before I knew it, I had 4 rows done. Randi was bored at work so she was coming home early to help... again day 4 post. She got home and I was a little nervous. Randi some times can let the littlest thing get to her or let it pass and I wasn't sure I was picking the right pieces of wood or the joints were tight enough... but needless to say she was pleased with what she saw and again offered to help. We continued and I put her on quality control so I could focus on getting the floor down. we worked till about 4pm and had every thing done. 

DAY 5 CONT...

After cleaning up the mess and putting all the tools away this is the final floor in the raw. We like it and think we did a great job for first timers at wood flooring. We learned the 8" planks are the way to go. they require about 2/3 the amount of work as the 3" stuff and require very little nails. The guy at the Depot said i needed 2 boxes of nails... 2000 nails... but i only used 1/2 a box. I didn't skimp either. For those that do not know we are going to do a white pickling on them and will be making the trim white. We bought a new couch that will be very comfy for those that visit, and feel that this will be a well used room. Let us know what you think as this is the end of the story. If you like it give us props if not who cares nobody asked.

A MESS... that has a happy ending

As many of you who have read this blog recently have seen we bought some new wood floors. We decided that the previous owner must have been blind when they picked the color of the laminate faux wood they installed. We also felt that of all the rooms in our house, this one would probably be the best pick to try something a little different. We purchased 8" eastern white pine flooring. Well here is our story of installing for the first time in my life real wood floors or any kind of flooring for that matter. This might be a long post so bear with me, i guarantee at least one laugh. 

DAY 1:

Removal of old flooring was a breeze. it came up in all of about 20 minutes with no problems. You can see from the photo how not so nice the color is. The rest of the downstairs is a dark brown so why red was picked is beyond me.

DAY 1 CONTINUED:

As with the previous floor these laminate glue down tiles came up pretty easily. The removal involved tools so it took probably 1 hour to remove... some might argue that bigger tools would have reduced time but i am not so sure. 

DAY 1 STILL CONTINUED:

Thinking that removing the tiles would give us a nice solid subfloor we were soon shown that old homes probably do not have solid anything. Whoever laid the previous floor decided that they would build a subfloor with 1" x 2" wood sticks that were rotted out with a layer of OSB and Plywood mix... 90% of which was also rotted out. This was the most time consuming part of my day. I could not pull up the pieces of plywood as all they would do is crumble. I had to cut between the studs with a circular saw and then pry up everything else connected to the floor. This portion of the job did not get completed on day one.

DAY 2:

More demo was required as the task was too time consuming for one day. We ended up borrowing a truck and buying 7 sheets of OSB to re-lay as sub-floor. Little did we know that what we thought was sub-flooring was not. It took all of day two to continue to demo the sub-floor. I soon realized that day 2 was soon gone and i still had more demo to do on day 3 as well as another trip to the hardware store for another round of OSB.

More to come of this crazy event so stay tuned... blogger is acting up so i am going to try another post.

 

New wood floors

We got our new pine wood floors delivered today and we can't wait to install them in the sunroom. We plan to do this after we get back from the holidays. So you will just have to wait and see what the room will look like with the green paint, white trim and white floors. I hope it all goes well.

Happy Camper

Justin and I are happy campers now that we have chosen a paint color for the sunroom. I'm just glad the paint selection process is over. After looking at thousands of colors provided by Justin's work I found this color in about 5 minutes at Home Depot.  Vote to let us know if you like or dislike it.

Boiler Removal

we were so excited to buy a house that we volunteered to remove the old boiler from the basement of our house. this one might think would be an easy task after all it was only about 4'x3'x5'... not that big. so one day while brig was in town i suggested we take it out of the basement. this stupid idea started the feat of removing the beast from the basement. we started small thinking we could just break it up but that didn't work out too well. we then started to see bolts and were excited thinking if we remove the bolts it would come apart and we would be done in an hour or so. well if the bolts came out as planned we wouldn't have spent 7 hours removing the boiler. turns out we had to cut most of the bolts in half and then pry them out of their holes hoping they would give. once we discovered the method of removing the boiler things sped up. we estimate that the boiler is about 1000 pounds of cast iron. we had it disassembled but now we had to remove it. being the nice brother that i am and tired of listening to brig complain about a broken finger nail, i picked the boiler up and took it out in one piece. i probably saved us another 10 hours of work. after a dirty 7 hours of work and a nice shower, we thought it would be nice to take brig out for dinner to thank him. unfortunately we ended up at a place that cooked the hamburgers way to long but in the end i think the day was really productive. thanks for the help brig and for future reference guest are welcomed anytime... the next task is the oil tank!!

Lakeview Terrace

For those of you who are curious Samuel L. Jackson doesn't live next door to us.

washer and dryer

this week marked a highlight in our home renovations. we have (after many months maybe even years of relentless discussion of what kind of apparatus to wash and dry our clothes with) have finally purchased a new washer and dryer. we went with the LG brand, front loading, high efficiency WM2016CW and DLE2516W models. For the lay person that is the model number for cheap and basic. we (as blogged about on this very blog site) have been creating a laundry room in which to house the WM2016CW and DLE2516W, This room is located on the second floor of our house and through research have learned that belt driven washers do not work very well for upstairs applications. The LG models have a drive shaft meaning no belts drive the washer. These are better for upstairs applications so we were sold... price and style did also influence our choice. So we now are the proud owners of a washer and a dryer in which we can now not only wash our unmentionables but yes we can dry them... hip hip hooray!! one note too mention the floor in the room may need to be changed as LG claims slight vibrations may be a problem... "If the floor is not solid, your washer will vibrate. You will hear and feel the vibration throughout you house." We are giving it time before we pour a concrete second floor in the house.