More Flooring Tales

Our flooring is taking shape. Here Steve relaxes on the first six feet of installed hardwood. He completed this portion on Saturday afternoon.The flooring is in! Steve nails in the very final piece of hardwood flooring. 275 square feet of flooring installed over 4 days, a lot of long hours, with a total of 7 helpers (Ella and Elisabeth helped put some of the boards in place) and probably 2500 nails. It's rather a relief to have this part of the job completed. But the work isn't finished.
Steve and Ella strike a relaxed pose (rather than another nail) after finishing the installation. Our "left-over" flooring is bundled in front of Ella....about 20 square feet...so we estimated rather well. Notice the miter saw...Steve also has his air compressor in the other corner, and I think he's contemplating making them permanent fixtures in his new "workshop". There may be some discussions on that one.

We have the living room and dining room floor installed at this point, but the hallway still needs to get some work done on its floor. Steve plans to refinish the existing hardwood in the downstairs hallway and the softwood (fir) in the upstairs hallway while he's in flooring mode. That means extra sanding and some prep work. While replacing some of the problem boards in the downstairs hallway, Steve came across this situation that needed rectifying...


Steve removed the suspect subfloor, creating a significant hole with direct access to our basement. Useful for we're not sure what, but not necessarily a desired accessory. So, he patched it up, and then relaid some new/old hardwood over the new subfloor, resulting in a much nicer floor than originally installed.


Here's the repaired hallway, along with the tools of the trade. Now, to strip off the old brown paint, which Steve is currently in process of doing. And then sanding all of the flooring, and then sealing and finishing. Hopefully just a few more days.

And here the family celebrates the completed installation and the great progress made by Steve....

The Floor Takes Shape

Slowly but surely the floor is coming along. I started nailing it down with the help of some friends this morning. By the afternoon, my back and arm were causing me to move a little more slowly and a little less surely. I think I picked the muggiest day of the year to nail flooring. I'll be surprised if the boards don't swell from all the sweat.

I had hoped that the nailing would be finished at the end of the day, and it might have been but for the renegade boards. Since this is reclaimed, we had some difficulty convincing the boards to work together and join up nicely. In the end, I think it will look good and it will certainly be full of character.

I was happy to have my "workshop" back now that we moved all that unnecessary furniture out of the room. Actually, I had the saw outside until the downpour.

The girls came and visited at lunch and dinner. They got a big kick out of the nailer and pretty much everything else. They both wanted to swing the hammer and I'm pretty sure they would have done a good job with it. Maybe I'll sleep in tomorrow and see what they can get done.

I'm a little over 1/3 done with the nailing, and I think the rest will go a little faster. Unless my arm revolts, I might finish nailing tomorrow.

It may not be as pretty as Ben's big city floor, but it has undisputed character.

Engineer by Day, Stripper by Night

Well I never thought it would come to this, but I'm stripping trim by night. I always figured it would just be fine as-is, but once I got down to it, it seemed better to strip than to sand and scrape. I'm sure Andy will cry when he sees all this beautiful paint coming off.

This is the trim that we removed from our first floor when we gutted the walls. It has generally lived with the flooring since then. We replaced windows and never decided whether to refinish the old trim or buy new but now the time has come and we are trying to salvage most of it.I'm still not sure if we will end up with boards nice enough to stain and finish or whether we will be re-painting. Either way, they need to be stripped. I thought it would be easy, but it turns out there is some work involved.

I have trim laid out for three windows and five doors. We will need to add a couple pieces since our door and window sizes changed somewhat.

The door and window trim might not get installed along with the flooring, but we will install baseboard. After assessing the state of our baseboard, we ended up with only about half of what we needed and a lot of small pieces. Thanks to a local millworks that had previously run a batch close to our profile, we were able to get some new boards. These are just over 7 inches tall - not much chance of finding that at your local home improvement center.

The trim is all pine and the flooring is hard maple, as it was originally.

Lucky

While I wouldn't consider myself unlucky, I can think of many times when Ben and Steve seemed quite a bit luckier than I did. There were the times when they got to be the good guys, and I'm pretty sure I was the Russians. (yes, plural) The times they got to use the secret underground tunnel from Terre Haute that went right into Grandma Barnhart's back yard, but which was never in working order when I wanted to try it. Then there was the time they found clay (even better than playdoh!) in the woods at Uncle Dick and Aunt Diane's house - I was beside myself with envy.

But tonight, when I least expected it, I was supremely lucky. I walked into the grocery store and picked a random cart to use, and there waiting for me, was the luckiest thing of all.

A milk knife. Ben and Steve, eat your heart out.

A+ Plumbing Company

Here is the old valve. It is impossible to find an adapter that fits this.
Here is my new valve. I had help putting it in from a friend from church, but later I added the elbow so it points down now and the oven can sit back further.
Here is is in all it's glory. I'm looking forward to many great meals from this baby.

Flooring's On!

With less than a month to go before baby Barnhart comes and with the recent flurry of house project posts, I thought it was a fine time to kick it into high gear and get our living room and dining room floor finished up.

The hardwood floor has been living in various stacks ever since we tore it up and painstakingly removed the nails (thanks Rachel and Paul!). The floor has lived on saw-horses under a tarp, in the car tent, in the front porch, and most recently in the garage. It's been in the process of getting cleaned up for about 5 years now. After removing the most obvious defects, we ran the flooring through a planer, hand-scraped all the joints, checked for nails, trimmed the ends, and ran it through the planer once again.


It doesn't take long for planer shavings to fill up the shop vac. Somehow, it still had suction.


Rachel helped run wood through the planer - I shoved it in, she grabbed it and stacked it. We had 2-4 pieces running through at all times and it took a little over an hour for the final planing.


The wood is planed, trimmed and neatly bundled. Within a week it should be acclimated to the house humidity and we'll start nailing it down. More photos to come.

Here's a photo of Rachel with our recently trimmed-out kitchen window. Part of the flooring project will be to clean up our old trim and finish up the living room/ dining room.

The Joy of Headers, or, On Tearing Out Walls

A couple weeks ago I finally made good on my threat to tear out a wall that was dividing my kitchen and dining room. Here are a few photos for those of you who think this sounds like a good time.



A photo of the wall before tear-out (it's the section on the right).



Even though it wasn't a load-bearing wall, I wanted to have some support in place when I removed the old studs. So the newer (whiter) 2x4s run through the ceiling and tie into the studs above where I needed to cut them. (note: if one of your 2x4 studs runs at the same angle as the one in this picture, you might need a new level or plumb bob).



For the header, I used two pieces of 2x10 LVL (laminated veneer lumber). It's stronger and straighter than regular lumber, and fun to order at your local lumber yard. Here they are reclining on the deck before being sandwiched together with construction adhesive and half a box of nails.



With the old studs out of the way, I pulled down an old 4-foot header that had spanned the opening.



Nailing in place the corner studs that the header will sit on.



How much do I love my new header? This much! As you can see, the new opening is quite wide and allows a lot more light to pass through from the kitchen to the dining room.

Janell's Anniversary Gift

I decided to purchase my lovely wife a combination food processor/blender as an anniversary gift. Upon getting this lovely gift home and opening it, I realized that it was not quite what I expected. Here's the photographic evidence.

A Halfway Kitchen (for a Halfway House)

Some of you may remember my post about that simple kitchen project I was looking forward to. With the very able assistance of one Mr. Mike Barnhart, that project took a giant leap forward this past week. Here's a brief photo update:



Plumbing in the new drain. Dad's trying out his old-timey serious pose.


The PEX water lines, which will feed the kitchen sink and dishwasher.


And here they are, stubbed up through the floor.


We had to remove some drywall in order to run new electrical lines for the countertop outlets.


More wiring. For those of you interested, we added six circuits: two dedicated GFCI receptacle circuits, one dedicated refrigerator circuit, one dedicated dishwasher circuit, one dedicated garbage disposal circuit, and one 220V range circuit (in case I decide to switch from gas range to electric range in the future). You could power a bingo parlor off this kitchen without tripping a breaker.


Closing the drywall back up.


The lower (base) cabinets are just sitting in place here. I still need to mud the drywall joints before I can install these, but Dad and I wanted to see what they'd look like sitting in the new kitchen. I think they look pretty good.

Watch out for killer biscuits

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The Cyclery of Bikes

Well everyone, I'd like to thank you for your contributions (or aspirations to contribute) to a new bike for me. My current one is on its last spokes. I bought it for $40 a couple summers ago, and I estimate that I've ridden between 1000 and 1500 miles on it now. At four cents a mile, I think that's about as cheap as transportation comes. With your generous gifts, rest assured that my next bike will be obscenely expensive and nowhere near the cents-per-mile ratio of my last.

I don't have the new bike yet, though I would have loved to post a picture. Being a shrewd blogger, I know that photo posts attract the most readers. Here then are two bike-related pictures that I've been meaning to post. The first is from 1992. The second, 2007. Fifteen years and the bike has come full circle again. Lest Ben think it was abused during the years outside his care, I'd like to remind him that the bike received a comprehensive tune-up around the Christmas of 2002.

The view from my window

For anyone I didn't talk to before I left (almost everyone) I am in the Bahamas with Casi and several of her friends and family. She decided to have her next birthday in the Bahamas (her 30th) so we all got cheap tickets and rented a big house to stay in. 

Here's the view from my window:

So far everything has been good - although we went through most of yesterday without any water...which meant no toilets.  Apparently it was an island-wide problem.  Now that the water is back on, I've been going as often as possible to ensure that I will have just gone if the water goes out again. That's what I call smart.

David gets a new birthday picture

Last weekend, David and Amber made their way out to Aurora in search of thrift stores, perhaps a little food, and a scrabble throw-down.


They were successful on the first two counts, but as the last picture will show, scrabble was a lot more fun for Andy than anyone else. Fortunately, as a consolation we had a cake decorated with David's two favorite pastimes: Nascar and beer. Very small beer.

Happy Birthday David!

Better late than never?

I feel sheepish even writing this because I don't have a catchy poem like Mom always creates and there is only one hour left of David's birthday. However, I happen to really like the tradition of making birthday blog posts, so despite my poor blogging skills, here it is. Happy birthday David!

Simple Kitchen Project

I have a simple house project, if anyone is looking to do some light work.

I need to take these cabinets–



–and put them in this room–



Nothing to it, right? In fact, if I wasn't wasting all this time blogging about it, I might have half of them installed already.

I've been keeping an eye on used kitchen cabinets, and this set just came in to the local ReUse Center. They're in pretty good shape, and the kind of style I was hoping to find in a used cabinet. They look like they came out of a 1950s era kitchen. Now I just need to get the wiring and plumbing in place, and then figure out my layout. Here are a couple of closeup shots, to show the finish and detail:



And this one's my favorite – the onion and potato bin cabinet.