What shall we use to fill the empty spaces?

This weekend Jack once again generously offered his time to help me (re)build the wall between the "Master" bathroom and bedroom. This wall had to be moved because it made the bathroom too narrow to house the clawfoot tub that had been installed prior to my purchase of the house. We started the project by determining that the existing antique bedroom baseboard was going to present a problem, both to the wall-building effort as well as the plaster repair / skimcoating yet to come. After we made that realization, it was a simple step to decide to remove it.





As you can see, it was pretty tall, and the horsehair plaster did not reach down behind it, so there is a pretty interesting view of the house sill, floor joists, and general construction of the place. Once the baseboards were removed and safely stowed, we began to lay out our footers.




This was really the first time the new wall started to feel like a reality for me. I could see how far it would extend into the bedroom, and how much room would be available in the new, larger bathroom. Me likey.

About this time, I got a call from my neighbor indicating that a delivery truck was outside of my house. My gas range had arrived! Many, many thanks to Mom and Dad for such an amazing piece of help!


After the footers were down, we used Jack's laser level (which shot laser lines on the floor, wall, and roof) to ensure that our first uprights and headers were all plumb and in proper alignment. At this time, we started to realize that the 2x4's we were using for this project were not the straightest ever cut (thanks, Lowe's), but we forged boldly onward using our framing nail gun and elbow grease to straighten and align them as necessary.


This technique worked very well for all of the single uprights and cross-members in our little addition, but when it came to the outside corner we had a real dilemma. The outside corner basically was built with a pillar of 3 2x4's nailed together, providing outside and inside faces appropriate for the (eventual) sheetrock installation. The twist in the boards, however, became more apparent as the top of this pillar was twisted almost 45 degrees clockwise from the bottom. It was a big setback, so we broke for lunch, making the Taco truck / Jefferson highway Lowe's run. BTW: I love that taco truck, on the lake side of Jeff hwy a few blocks on the downtown side of Lowe's. Don't be scared to try it! At a few fits and starts (and visits to a number of hardware stores besides that Lowe's) we got some clamps that, along with some cleverly cut blocks, allowed us to clamp the twist out of the pillar. Here's a view looking up from the floor at that whole operation:



At that point, it was time to call it a day. We returned to the project Sunday morning with the goal of getting all the way through installing the sheetrock, but even our first step was a little off as we remembered that Home Depot doesn't carry the paperless drywall I want to use in the bathroom, and we had to go to Lowe's, again. However, we picked up the sheetrock we needed along with some Stryp-eez in a spray can Becky wanted to try on the windows and a couple of other needed tools.

Jack and I started off by getting some firebreak pieces installed along with the final upright.


Once that stuff was installed, we ran the electrical outlets in this wall, one facing the bedroom and one facing the bathroom and protected by GFCI.


All in all, it was a very successful morning, so we turned our attention to this twisted pillar. As we removed the clamps, we saw that it wanted to return to its original twisted position. Frustrating, so we decided to shop around a little bit for a solution. After a nice lunch at Gott Gourmet (also recommended... don't be afraid to get the Chicago Dog, it's inexpensive and very good) and yet another trip to home Depot, we felt we had the proper tools to finish this project. Using levers, levels, clamps, elbow grease, and a lot of cursing, we finally got the top of the pillar in line and secured with hurricane braces (shown here). That took all afternoon, and around 5 we decided to call it a day.


I want to thank Jack again for his help. No way I could have done this without him. I hope to have pics of a completed wall in the next couple of weeks!

Always Use Protection

A lot of time this weekend was spent making an accurate representation of the available space on Visio. Saturday I decided I wanted to get enough tarp to properly cover the floors to protect them from the next phase of work, and as I began measuring the floor spaces I realized that I probably only wanted to do that once. So, I included measurements for doors and windows and countertops and such. What I ended up with is a document that I hope continues to be useful for materials estimates and furniture layout. See it below (really, and click on it to get a closeup!):


On Sunday, Becky and I purchased and laid out all of the necessary plastic sheeting, no mean accomlishment since we had to go to Lowe's to pick up the tarps and that place is like a black hole for time. We also purchased a number of sheets of Luan, a low grade light plywood useful for laying down over the plastic in an area where you might be working to protect the floor underneath from dropped tools and such.

While at the store, I ran into some old family friends, Homer Ed and Carolyn, and we spent a nice time catching up before returning to our shopping. On our way home, Becky and I grabbed lunch at the taco stand where I am now becoming a regular. We enjoyed our lunch-from-a-truck on the steps of the house with an orange Fanta, then laid down plastic over all the floors as seen below.





When we were finished laying plastic, we experimented with the idea of sanding and poly-ing the wainscotting, but after a couple of experimental sanding spots turned out a different color than we expected, we decided to drop the idea of sanding. I may still put a coat of poly on the wainscotting, but I am more interested in spending the coming weekend building the new bathroom wall and hanging sheetrock in there.

Right about the time we decided we weren't going to sand, Jack called and requested that I bring back his shop-vac and give him a hand cleaning the other side of his double. I hustled over there and spent the rest of the day sprucing the place up so he would feel good about moving in.

Anyway, we're nearing the point of sheetrock mud and paint, so if you're reading this and feel like getting a putty knife in hand, get in touch!

4 Full Coats of Poly, 3 China Brushes, 2 Lights left on and for each of us a pair of sore knees!

The Holiday season has passed, but it was wonderful! Becky and I spent Christmas in Lafayette, playing board games and spending some wonderful time with my family. The food was matched only by the company.

Now, about the house:

On Christmas Eve, I got off of work around lunch and headed over to Becky's apartment. After a quick change into some house-work clothes, it was off to the house to apply coat #3. With some observation from Jack, we knocked out the 3rd coat pretty quickly. Sorry, no pics of coat #3.

When we got back from Lafayette late Friday evening, after a wonderful meal with Aaron and his family in Baton Rouge, we opened presents late into the night. I used the following day to do some housework and to get some exercise with Jack and his dog, Scout. Sunday it was back to work on the floors, where Jack, Becky, and myself knocked out the last coat like we were pros.

I came back a couple of days later and took the pictures you see below. Hooray, floors!

2nd Coat down!

... and I think it's looking pretty good!

Getting down to the nitty-gritty

After a weekend of sanding, cleaning, and applying the first layer of finish, the floor refinishing project is nearing completion. Friday was a day spent frantically ensuring that I had all the materials for an early start on Saturday. Matt, who has worked with Jack in the past, is a professional contractor who has, in the past, specialized in flooring. He has refinished many floors and was an *awesome* source of both help and knowledge. On a previous Sunday, he helped me create my materials list, and also gave me an overview of how the project should proceed. He showed up this Saturday morning ready to go, and fortunately my preparations had gotten the house ready to begin.

Saturday morning, at 6:15, I swung over to Jack's with Becky. We loaded up into his pickup and headed to home depot to pick up the sander. The sander rental is 28$ for four hours, or 40$ for 24 hours. Needless to say, we went with the 24 hour option. We also purchased all the necessary sandpaper for the rental sander (the most expensive part of the project, 6$ a sheet and we got 30 sheets). I had already purchased a whole boatload of other necessary items, including brushes, mineral spirits, rags, hand sandpaper, more mineral spirits, and a few other items.

Then, we got right to it (right after a minor scare with someone falling through the hole where the central air return grille had been removed to allow sanding access to the floor around its rim). Matt handled the big rented sander and Jack and I started doing some detail sanding of the edges and corners with palm sanders. The big rental sander started up with 36 grit sandpaper attached, which looked almost like small gravel attached to paper. It really took the old finish off the floors pretty quickly!



I wanted the floor to keep a lot of its character, though. I wanted it to look beautiful, but *OLD* and beautiful, which is kind of the general theme I am shooting for with the whole decor. This meant that I didn't want to sand too much of the "character" off of the floor, I really just wanted to get it protected and sort of uniformly covered with finish.

The floor underneath what had been the bathroom wall was interesting. As it had obviously not been sanded during the last floor refinishing, it was sort of a ridge that needed some serious hand sanding to flatten. Here it is after a good bit of effort (you can hardly tell!). You can also see the dust that covered everything during the sanding process.


Here is a shot of the living room during a change of sandpaper:


And a shot from the living room to the bathroom (that's my repair job in the hallway, again looking pretty good for an amateur, I think!).


After the sanding was done, we had to inspect the floor for sander marks and blemishes. We did a pretty careful inspection and deemed that the floor would be ready for Sunday's cleaning and finishing effort. Then, we drank beer.

Sunday started a little slowly due to the beer drinking previously mentioned, however the workload left was much smaller and we had more help as Becky and Sylvia (Matt's girlfriend and an expert at applying finish) were able to join us. After some final detail sanding, we vacuumed the floor as clean as possible and began a wipe down of the entire surface with mineral spirits, always pulling any dirt or grit towards the door we would eventually be exiting from. No shoes were worn in the house from this point on! Here is a pic of what the floor looked like after we had wiped it down:


Once the floor was clean, it was time to apply the poly. This was pretty simple: apply a thin coat, using brush strokes with the grain. We joined together as a team and were able to accomplish this pretty quickly, and we finished the first coat at about 11 AM on Sunday. Thank goodness, too, because this gave the finish (a semi-gloss polyurethane) time to dry before the cold snap hit later that night! The last picture in this post is a pic of the "team" finishing up the first coat in the living room, and I was struck by its similarity to an impressionist painting by Gustave Caillebotte called The Floor Scrapers, which I stumbled across in my Internet research for tips on refinishing old hardwood floors:





Have a merry, merry Christmas!

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!

O Little Town of Metairie...

Crazy week! It snowed here, as much as I have ever seen in southern Louisiana. When I woke up yesterday, everything was grey and rainy. I performed my usual morning routine, tromped off the the car, and began my daily commute. I was on I-10 headed out to Metairie from uptown, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but snow, falling from the sky! It was hesitant at first, snowflakes drifting down between big fat raindrops, but as i continued driving I noticed that the rain pretty much disappeared and snow was actually falling in pretty copious amounts (for our gentle southern climate, at least!)

Several hours and a number of inches of snow later, the city was coated in snow. A couple of hours after that, there wasn't much snow to be seen anywhere as the sun came back out to reclaim its territory. What a neat day.

Here are some pics! I love the ones where you can see snow in the palm trees!