Summer Weather

Our iris that were planted last year are in full bloom this year! They came in like monsters this year and have lots of blooms, we found out this year that we have two colors. We only got purple ones last year, this year we have a lot of these red-orange one.
Before I talk about anything else, I should mention that we do continually to actual finish things! I've been working on the faceframes to the built-in closets that I made late this winter. I found a new mill to get wood from and they had a bunch of butternet, which is different and quite pretty. It cost me 3.00$/bdft for 4/4 stuff, all S4S and ready to go, so it ended up running me about 80$ for all the lumber for both frames. I put a picture of the raw cabinets and then finished up. I used danish oil to finish the frames and polyurethaned the plywood carcasses.



I loaded up the closet this evening and had plenty of space for everything, so I think it worked out fairly well. I had to do mine first so that we could unload the baby's room closet, I'll still need to stain and polyurethane Julies closet.
In more foolish news, I give you this:

I tore up our hallway over memorial day weekend. Every year, the hallway has gotten lumpier and lumpier with certain humps coming up in the summer and others coming up in the winter. On top of that we had nasty stained cathair-attracting carpet, and so I decided it was about my last chance to go ahead an pull it before the baby arrives. Putting down new subfloor and sistering joists is dirty, dusty, noisy work and I really don't want the baby breathing the nasty fine dust that comes out of opening walls in this house. Let alone, ALL of the bedrooms are accessed through the hall, so it can't stay out of commission, so it was a long painful one day job. I tore out the carpet and old subfloor, sistered the joists (primarily to reset level-ness) and dropped new subfloor. I came up one sheet of subfloor short and ended up finishing at about 6:30 in the evening without getting flooring down on the extension that hangs over the stairs. You can see the sistered up joists in the picture below, same nonsense as always. The only difference was that I had joists from the baby's room coming in on one side of the joists already, so I didn't have any choice about where to put the sisters. The goal here was just re-setting level in the floor, no so much strengthenin things.

I've only started putting down flooring here, the final floor will be a mix quarter sawn white oak and black walnut (all 2-1/4), but I've just started setting the edges and getting the junctions with other rooms flooring lined up. The goal is to get a seamless transition from the hallway into the rooms. The hallway has 7 entrances in it (4 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 1 closet, and the stairway), so I'll need to be patient getting going. I've got the stairway and baby room threshold worked out and it looks pretty good. Many more to go, unfortunately.

Our Bedroom

I've been quite slack in putting updates here. I had my first vacation in a year over Christmas break, fortunately Cornell has year-end shutdown. I celebrated by giving our room a make-over! With Baby on the way, we figured doing it now was the last chance we'd get to take care of it for a while, so I went for it.

Here are some before pictures of our lovely room. We had green plush carpet that ran into the bathroom. We had a small closet in one corner and a pseudo-closet (left picture) that was built into the rafters. It wasn't particular useful, it was deep with no headroom, and kind of trashy. The room was also very dark, partially because of the thick drapes we had never gotten rid of, partially because of no overhead lights, and partially because of the dark carpet. So in our plan we wanted to fix the floor (it was sloopy and creaky underneath that awesome carpet), get rid of the lovely floral wallpaper, add closet space, add a ceiling fan, and improve the lighting. So we set out to reinforce and flatten the floor, put down new hardwood flooring, remove the wallpaper, add a overhead light/fan, and increase the outlets so that we could place more lights around the room.

Reinforcing the floor was pretty much the same trick as in other rooms, except here I was able to use 2x glued and nailed to the exisiting joists. The picture below on the right shows the first reconstruction. This was a new floor that was built as a second level expansion in the mid 80's on top of what was an original closed-in porch. The porch was converted to interior space at the same time. It means that the framing in this area is some what chaotic. Load-bearing walls aren't always where they should be, and things are a bit strange. The beam running parallel to the window runs through the center of the room and marks the original exterior wall. There is a faux beam in the donstairs underneath this. Most of this section was in fairly good shape, but the connections to the now exterior wall were feeble, and some of the connections to the beam weren't right. On the far right of the picture are new joists that extend and are tied directly into the joists on the other side of that beam. Before, there wasn't much holding the ends of those up.














The picture on the right shows the other problem I came across while tearing things up. All of our windows have crappily applied aluminum trim and water has been leaking through. Things weren't too bad once I got everything out. The wood was still in good shape, the drywall and insulation was gross. I replaced two of the moldier cripple studs, scrubbed everything down with bleach and caulked outside. This spring, I'll need to remove all of the aluminum trim and fix the actual problem outside. I did the floor in halves, so I left the flooring on one side, while I replaced the half by the window, then put down new OSB subfloor, and replaced on the other side. The old subfloor was (as expected) an amalgam of sorts. There was a layer of 1/4" underlayment over everything, then below that, half the floor had plywood, while the other half was the original T&G with floral linoleum on top.
The wallpaper didn't come off well, so I ended up replacing more drywall than I had intended. The ceiling is only about 7'6 in this room, so there was barely room for the ceiling fan. We decided to move the bed and placed the ceiling fan centered over where the bed would be. With the bed in place it looks fine, but it may be trouble f we ever want to move the bed. The bottom of the light is only about 6'6", so it's tight. The ceiling is low due to a mildly botched insulation job, I would have only gained 4-5" inches in trying to fix it, and it didn't seem worth it. So I left it alone. We'll just have to deal with a low-ish ceiling.















I decided to do built-in closets that would sit in the room. I glued and screwed 1/4" maple plywood to the wall behind where the closet will go and then built modular carcasses out of maple and stacked things up. As usual, I built things a little large, I made the boxes 27" deep, which is about 6" too deep. Foolishly, I took the depth of a reach-in close and used that as my dimension, but that doesn't make as much sense for cabinets at waist level. So there's going to be an awful lot of wasted space in the cabinets that are a full 27" deep and above waist height.
The cabinet that has a bottle of glue in it, is the poster child for this closet. I ended up reducing the size of the cabinet in the middle of the main closet area in the picture above. That area of the closet is where the closet rod goes, so that cabinet will be a 18" deep and 18" wide, so there's more room for a bottom closet rod. Eventually (cough), I'll build cherry face frames for the carcasses. We put 6" cherry hardwood down in here, and used maple plywood for the cabinets. I'll either use cherry or maybe walnut, something dark to set off the light cabinet wood.

Anybody Want a Cat

This is Kitten's foot prints in fresh wet polyurethane. Any normal cat would have taken a couple of steps and gone "Ick!" and turned around. Kitten on the other hand, slip-slided her way all the way across the floor, right through the middle of the floor.
We forgot to mention the house's former residents stopped by a few weeks ago. He got into the house when we were closing up the chimney chase. He (or she, I suppose) probably crawled into the chimney from the top and we disturbed him with the heat. He came busting out into the family room and then moved on to orbiting the dining room for ten minutes until we succesfully created a multi-blanket screen to direct him out the front door.
Hopefully, he found a new warm place to hole up. We need all the healthy bats we can get here in New York.

Floors

In todays webisode, I'll be going through the floor we installed in this room. We got hardwood from Seneca Hardwoods, which is a cool local company. It's a nice place with good people, they are very tolerant of people wandering in and incessantly changing their mind about things. The store is actually an outlet store, they ship most of their stuff elsewhere for sale, but they're really good to people showing up at their place. Their place is a big empty warehouse with a tiny room in it that acts as the office. When I showed up to pick up the hardwood, I got there at about 10am, which as it turns out, is coffee break time. The guys found me a coffee cup and I hung around in the office for 15 minutes until the office lady came back. We discussed how to unfreeze the truck stalled in the parking lot (it was ~5 that morning) and how clear the birch was they had milled for me the day before. Suffice it to say, I'll be back! So I barely managed to jam 3 bundles and cherry and 7 bundles of yellow birch in the back of the Audi. Barely. For those who don't know, yellow birch is very hard and dense. It's about as dense as beech or white oak, and so lugging 7 bundles (~20 sqft/bundle) of this upstairs almost killed me. We let the wood acclimate for about two weeks up stairs and put it down in a long weekend. I spent about a day removing squeaks by rescrewing the subfloor down, patching holes, vacuuming incessantly, and finally putting down red rosing paper.
I taped up the seams of the rosin paper, primarily to make sure that it would be easy to keep the floor clean as I worked. The plan was to put a cherry border around the room 3 strips (9") wide around the room in a picture frame setup (woven corners) and doing he bulk of the floor with the birch. I started off the next day putting the first piece of cherry along the side of the room I was working from and started around the sides of the room. After a trip to the rental store, I brought back the flooring nailer. I was able to use the nailer on the second piece of flooring, which was far better than hand nailing things. I picked up the nailer around 9am and worked straight for about 12 or 13 hours. You get loopy after 8 or so hours of racking, cutting and nailing flooring.
Here I am just about finishing up. You'll notice it's plenty dark outside. I worked alone until about 2 in the afternoon, and then Julie bailed me out and started racking and cutting boards for me. The picture framed cherry I had oriented so that the tongues were facing the birch, but the flooring we got wasn't end-matched (no groove on the ends). So Julie took over the job of racking the pieces and adding the groove to pieces that abutted the cherry border. I had setup the tenoning jig on the tablesaw to cut the groove, and she ran the table saw all afternoon.
I wouldn't have finished in one day without her helping me with it. It was a ridiculously long day, but I was glad to just get it done. The next morning, I drove back to the rental store, returned the nailer and promptly picked up the floor sander. I was laughed at.
The floor sanded out really nice. I used one of the jitterbug type sanders instead of a drum sander. I think next time I will go for the drum sander. I know it's harder to control and much more aggressive, but the jitterbug takes for ever and all of your money goes into sand paper. The sheets of sandpaper are about 8x for the jitterbug, and so being a cheapskate, I end up using fewer pieces of sandpaper then I should. Either way, I did a fine job of producing massive amounts of dust and the floor sanded up nicely. We swept, vacuumed, swept some more, vacuumed a couple more times, and finally dust mopped with denatured alcohol on rags.
Once this dried, we followed up with a coat of sanding sealer (zinser sealcoat), and then the poly. I wanted to try to match the character of the original hardwood flooring downstairs, and I wanted to make sure the cherry darkened up nicely, so I used oil-based Varathane. I had a really tough time with the mop head applicator for the urethane and quickly abandoned it. I ended up on my hands and knees applying three coats of poly with a 4 inch brush. Thank goodness it was only 160 sqft!
Above is the floor with one coat of poly and below is with three coats on. The first coat was a little crappy, but I got better as went along and the third coat was pretty good. Hopefully it'll hold up well and I won't be repeating the process in 2 years.
Next, I'll show you the trim and the frieze boards I made for over the doors.

I've been lazy here for the last couple of months, so I'm going to try and play catch up over the next couple of weeks. We've finished up the room (though we don't actually have any furniture for it) shown in these pictures, but I'll just pretend it's not done yet here! This is the purple room, which is the room we replaced the windows in, an upstairs bedroom, we ended up taking it down to the studs, as we the wiring was pretty shady in there. Part of the walls were plastered, you can see the hallway walls in the picture below, which is drywall over plaster.
All the power in this room is on a new circuit, so the other bedrooms are less stressed as well. Of course, I also managed to run cable and cat5 up to this room, because I can't help myself.

Julie and I drywalled and taped the room over a long weekend. She was an animal hanging drywall, so in the next room, I'll be leaving all that to her. I'll just come in when there's painting to be done. I figured people would appreciate the complete mess of drywall dust that we had partway through the sanding, mudding cycle. You can also see the beginning of the "bay" window seat builtin. The window seat will have three small bookshelves in the front and hidden storage underneath, which will be accesible from the top via a trap door. You can see the three bookshelf boxes in the picture above, I'd just leveled them on a base and attached them to the floor and each other (hence the clamps hanging off of them). When I did this I was planning on building and staining pine face frames.
We painted the room kind of a sky-blue color. We're planning on doing white trim in here, so we wanted a rich color to set off the white trim. We want to do paneled walls with a plate rail in here, so lots of white against the blue. The walls actually came out quite good, which is probably a minor miracle and only took 3 mud/sand cycles. I was prepared for more, but we did a pretty good job, I think.
We found a hardwood supplier in the next county over that harvests and mills locally (Schuyler county), which was pretty cool. It took two trips by me and one trip by Julie, but we finally decided on birch with a cherry border. We had intially thought Oak, then I wanted cherry with a maple border, on and on. Finally, Julie really liked the look of Birch, and so we went with that. We used 3 1/4 strips, but I think I actually like the 2 1/4 better. The mill has also recently started making quarter-sawn oak and they're doing up to 10" wide stuff. If only I could get my hands on some unfinished walnut 2 1/4 flooring I'd be a happy man! Either way, I managed to just barely jam 160 square feet of birch and cherry hardwood flooring in the Audi, and I figured you'd appreciate the picture. Around every corner, the pile of wood tried to squish me, but I made it home! Snow and all!