There's a hole in the floor!

A lot has happened with the house since my last post, and I am not going to backtrack in detail. Suffice to say that I have learned all about climbing under the house, sweating pipe, the use of Bunny bread in a plumber's world, and a host of other fun tips from checking for gas leaks to using a rotary tool on plaster (which works very well, by the way).

This blog entry, however, is going to focus on the prep work for the big upcoming project this weekend: wood floor refinishing! This weekend, with the help of Matt and Sylvia, and possibly Jack, Becky, and maybe even Tork, I am going to be like Daniel-san and sand-the-floor.

A couple of months ago I was wrestling with ideas for renovating the bathroom. Originally, the bathroom came with a beautiful claw-foot tub that was too big to fit properly between the walls. This resulted in the back of the bathtub actually poking a hole in the sheetrock on one side of the bathroom. This bathroom was also home to the worst-placed floor furnace of all time. The floor furnace was actually installed in the bathroom doorway! Add to that it was ridiculously cramped, poorly placed, and there was no place to store towels or TP. Obviously, something needed to be done here.

So, with the help of my good friend Jack (who I have now promised is to be a guest of honor at any housewarming party), I tore out a wall between the bathroom and the master bedroom.


Then, I took out the floor furnace. Man that thing was big! It looked like a diesel engine.


Then we built a frame in the hole to support the new floorboards.

After that, I had to remove some of the floorboards so that the repair job wouldn't look, well, like a repair job. This involved some interesting cutting and chiselling to "stagger" the end-seams. In the process, I determined that the floor is, for the most part, in great, solid condition.


I also took out a couple of boards towards the middle of the bathroom to repair the hole where the old toilet was, and one that was cut prematurely for the new toilet position that didn't quite work.
The flooring was held in place with ancient, humongous square-cut nails. Chiselling around these for a straight seam was one of the most challenging parts of this operation.



Jack had brought over some flooring that looked like it would be a perfect fit, if not a match, from his house. The boards he brought were pretty dirty (they had been under water during floods several times in the last 100 years) and in the end did not fit as well as we had hoped. The wood was just a little too narrow, and with so many replacement boards adjacent to each other, the gaps were just too big.


So I went to Ricca's hardware, which is a really neat old place that has lots of old wood doors, mantles, wrought iron, clawfoot tubs, and other antique architectural features. Thay where i spoke with Jim, their carpenter, about replacing my flooring. I had brought a sample of what I needed and we determined that he would be able to help by taking some flooring he had that was larger than what I needed and planing, trimming, and routing it. The price was about 4$ a linear foot. I needed about 38 feet, and I tipped him for helping me measure and prepare the boards.



The wood turned out to be a much better fit! There is a little technique to getting these tongue-and-groove boards to fit during the repair process, but with some instruction from Matt and a number of other sources, I got through it. And, color-wise, it seems a perfect match. All in all, it seems as though we are going to be ready for this weekend!