My very first hardwood floor (part two)

Weren't we discussing something about a floor?

When last we checked in on the progress of the flooring, we had successfully completed hiring someone to successfully complete our floor. Sweet. Of course, we told them we'd take care of the trim ourselves, and we're still working on that, what is it, six months later? (Six months? Holy crap. You'd think we had to plan a wedding or something.)

But we've been banging away at it since Christmas (off and on), and it looks really really good, and I'd especially like to thank my brother, who helped with quite a bit of the trim in the last week before the wedding - if only so he could actually spend time with me because I was otherwise too busy to pay attention to him and his new son (cute as he was). I'm a terrible brother and a rotten uncle. (The jury is still out on what kind of a husband I'll make, but if I were you, I'd bet the under.)

(Man, this post got off track in a hurry again, didn't it?)

Anyway, remind me to post some shots of the finished trim in the dining room, kitchen, and hall, would you? Actually, if you could remind me to TAKE some shots of the finished trim so I have some to post, that would be great.

So, on to the upstairs. The carpet throughout the upstairs of the house was the same as the crappy stuff throughout the downstairs. Only worse. Dustier, dirtier, and more off-putting for the War Department's allergies. Which is why we were sleeping downstairs in the "family room" for the first few weeks. She couldn't spend more than a few minutes near the carpet without breaking out in sneezes or hives or whatever it is allergy sufferers have to deal with. (What am I, a doctor?)

The War Department is also apparently allergic to popcorn ceilings - or at least, so she claimed. Which meant a couple of successive evenings on top of the stepladder misting and then scraping a whole whackload of cellulose off the ceiling. Oh - but not right away. I had to get it tested for asbestos first. After the vermiculite in the attic of the last house, I wasn't taking any chances.

Good thing, too, considering what an unholy mess this job turned out to be.



I have to say, though, once we started scraping it off, I could see just how unbelievably dirty it really was. I mean, it was absolutely covered in invisible cobwebs, dead bugs, dust, and whatever else happened to be light enough to float up there and stick to all the little protrusions.

Anyway, once we'd scraped off all the popcorn, it was time to call our old friend Tony, the drywall artiste. It took him three trips, but he got the ceiling looking like it was brand new.

Oh, while he was here, he also took care of a few minor things downstairs in the living room. The ungodly mess over the fireplace, for example, that was left when we tore off the old, ugly, shabby-ass mantel.

This piece of shit:



Before Tony's magic:



After:



(It's a different color because it's still wet.)

Now that we have the workbenches set up in the garage, I can start maybe thinking about how to build a new mantel for there.

What's that? Oh, yeah, we spent last Saturday (ALL of last Saturday) taking everything out of the garage, organizing a bit of a workspace, and then stuffing it all back in again. Okay, so some of the eighteen brazillian boxes of books went into the house itself, but most of it just got reorganized and stored in the garage.

When we started:



After what felt like 12 hours or so of moving the same box four hundred times:



Wow.. so much for staying on topic, eh?

Anyway, once Tony was done working his particular brand of magic on the ceiling, it was time to paint:



And once THAT was done, it was time to break out the screws and some levelling compound and try to get the floor as flat as we could before actually laying the flooring. Which was right about the time I started thinking seriously about how to actually attach the floor to ... the floor.

I mentioned in the last post about the floor that the flooring we bought was tongue and groove. Rather than float it, I figured we should staple it down - mostly because we could, and its preferable to floating. Only problem was, well, I'm not the world's fastest floorer. (Not a word, but oh well.) So renting a tool would most likely be cost-prohibitive, as they say. Fortunately, Mr. Awesome had a compressor we could borrow, so that was no problem, but he didn't have a stapler, or a nailgun that used the right gauge of nails.

So, once again, it was off to Home Despot, where we were lucky enough to find this little beauty on sale:



As the tool salesman told us, it's not exactly professional grade, but would easily hold up for the 800 or so square feet of our project, and at a price that was only about two-and-a-half days worth of renting a similar stapler. So we bought it.

And it turned out to be a good purchase, actually, as we shall see in the NEXT installment of My Very First Hardwood Floor! But now, it's time for another edition of our new feature,

This Week In Mayonnaise!

Way back when, I pointed out that Frank (the previous owner) had a rather haphazard approach to electrical, particularly when it came to running lines to his various fountains and outside outlets. I believe I mentioned that he used leftover sprinkler piping to run the "wiring" (I use the quotes because I refuse to refer to the use of speaker wire and leftover bits of extension cords as actual wiring) from within the house to the outside outlet. This was accomplished by the simple expedience of drilling holes in the outside of the house and then attaching his "wiring" to the nearest electrical outlet. Here's an example (note that this is the only one where he used actual electrical wires):



Now, Frank wasn't so stupid or senile to be completely unaware of the dangers of mixing water with electricity, and (you can see where I'm going with this) the idea of running his "wiring" through a sprinkler pipe must have fired off the right neurons or something, because he took it upon himself to carefully seal the joints in his sprinkler pipes.

Three guesses what he used to seal those joints, and the first two don't count: