Floor is finished!

Well, the floor in the dining room is finished!  This was a crazy project.  This is what happens, I suppose, when one thinks that hey, this project can’t be that bad.  This was supposed to be a quick fix to bring the dining room’s appearance into line with the nice, fresh living room.  We were supposed to pull up the crappy old wall-to-wall carpeting and find the same nice hardwood floor that we found in the living room.  We were supposed to be cleaned-up and have the furniture back in the room that same day. 

As with most old house “quick” jobs, this one turned into a bit of a monster.  In the previous entry, I detailed how we found plywood under the carpet, instead of a nice hardwood floor.  Jenny and I made the decision to go ahead and spend the money to put in a hardwood floor, using the existing plywood as the subfloor.  We went with a 3/8″ product that is actually a hardwood veneer.  This does a few things for us, including simplifying installation, making the floor level not such a great change from the surrounding rooms, and increases the stability of the product (solid wood floors will move with changes in humidity, but a plywood product with a hardwood veneer doesn’t move much at all).  The product was also pre-finished, so we didn’t have to worry about renting a drum sander and then dealing with applying a finish.  Installation was staple-down (small-crown one-inch staples) with a pneumatic stapler, which I already had.  This installation method meant that we could work at our own pace, and could use the floor immediately after it was finished.  Some glue-down methods, besides being messy and far more permanent than mechanical fasteners, require waiting some amount of time before one can use the floor.  Since one must pass through the dining room to get to the kitchen and basement, and it is winter here with lots of snow and cold outside, having to use the outside to get to the kitchen was not such a great idea.  Besides that, we wanted a floor that made sense with the house, and a real wood floor with mechanical fasteners was really the way to go. 

During the past week Jenny and I managed to get about half of the floor finished.  There are a lot of cuts necessary in this room, due to the interesting shape and floor features.  Two thirds of one wall are at 45 degrees to the other walls, so all of the boards there needed a miter cut.  Basically, it involved a lot of cutting, and a lot of scribe cuts around wall and doorway features.  I’m leaving tomorrow for a short trip, but I didn’t want to leave Jenny with a half-finished floor and furniture spread all over the first floor.  My Mom offered to come down to help today, and my Dad came with her, so the four of us got started working like crazy at around 11:30 this morning.  We had furniture back in the room and were completely cleaned-up at around 7PM.  That included about 15 minutes for a break in the mid-afternoon, and about 30 minutes for food a little while after that. 

While we were working, my Dad was also shooting some video for our future old house restoration podcasts!  I’m excited about this.  We were originally going to do some video on the living room restoration today, too, but we just ran out of time.  Jenny and I need to hit the road early tomorrow so that I can catch my train (which is, incidentally, already listed as 30 minutes late), and I still had to pack, so the living room video had to wait.  That’s okay, though, because I am now completely exhausted.

It feels great to be done with this floor.  I keep looking in there and thinking about how much better it looks.  One casualty of this work, though, was the quarter-round for the room.  It was in really bad shape–even worse than the stuff in the living room.  It had some rot issues around where the windows are, and had already been damaged when the last people pulled it up to put in the plywood floor.  It had pieces of carpet painted to it, and just looked really, really bad.  It had to go.  I hated to do it.  On one hand, it is probably the original quarter-round that went with the trim (though that’s almost impossible to tell for sure), and I hated to throw away the work of some assistant to the assistant to the assistant of some craftsman.  On the other hand, there was little hope for getting this stuff back in shape.  It had already been cracked over nearly every length by the previous people who removed it, and some of it just fell apart when I tried to remove it.  Of course, some parts of it were in good shape and were really hard for being pine, but there wasn’t enough there to save for anything.  When I get back from my trip, I’m going to call up our favorite lumber supplier (Mars Lumber) to see if they can supply some quarter-round in clear pine, and find out how much that might cost.  I’m going to have to measure to see how many linear feet we need, but it should work out pretty well.  I’m also going to need to get some decent looking red oak to build some moulding to go around the hearth, as I want to make it look somewhat like the one in the living room, and have something to cover the edges of the new wood. 

The room was, surprisingly, just about square.  It had a difference of about a quarter inch over the length of the wall when we were putting in the last row of flooring.  I think that’s pretty good for an old house.

So now we’re finished.  I made some sandwiches for the train ride tomorrow, and now have to pack and hit the sack.  Unfortunately, I already packed my mini-usb cable, so I can’t get the pictures off of my camera right now.  I’ll have to get them when I get back from my trip.  In the meantime, Jenny will have a floor to enjoy.  I hope the cats like it.  🙂 

jonathan