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!

A house warming!

This actually happened last November, which throws off the timeline a bit, but I realized that the pictures still haven't been posted and I wanted to share them. We invited the old gang over for a house-warming of sorts...Well, at least a way to help warm our house. The large walk-up attic was not properly insulated - there was only about 6 inches or so of old vermiculite. This did raise some alarms, because old vermiculite can contain asbestos and this was old vermiculite. We collected several samples of the vermiculite from different areas of the attic, some on the bottom and some at the top and sent it away for testing. Luckily for us, there was no asbestos in any of the samples. Which was good because our plan involved vacuuming out and hauling it down two flights and out of the house. And then re-insulating the attic with some thick R-38!
First the floorboards had to be pulled up and Adam was the first to arrive so he was "lucky"enough to help me and Nate pull up the boards and remove the nails. Next vermiculite removal - so Adam, Tom, and Nate (and eventually Rob) went to work shoveling and vacuuming vermiculite into large garbage bags and I helped by hauling the bags downstairs.



I didn't do much, but judging by what I saw, it was a lot of very hard work. And surprisingly, garbarge bags filled with vermiculite are HEAVY!


We would never expect our friends to work without food or drink and this seemed like a perfect excuse for our traditional turkey fry. On a side note, I couldn't find my turkey injector, so I made a puree of garlic and spices (sage, oregano, thyme from the garden) and a little EVOO and placed it under the skin of the turkey. Delicious!



We couldn't have done it without you guys! Thanks - let's do it again next year! (Our garage needs to be insulated next!)

Christmas time is here

Well its Christmas eve eve - time flies when your having fun! Or renovating an old house. We've had an eventful fall Nate was able to install new low-e anderson windows in the upstairs before it got too cold.















We started renovating the inside of that room as well. I came home from work one day and all of the dry wall was in the driveway. It was painted a terrible dark blue, and there was an equally terrible purple shag carpet in there. But that was all removed down to the studs...Nate was able
install new additional outlets around the room (he even passed the electrical inspection -what a stud!). And then we hung new drywall. Yes, even me. Nate showed me how to cut and hang drywall sheets. I even got pretty good at "dimpling" the drywall screws, if I do say so myself!














I was also able to finally take care of something that had been bothering me since we moved in - the kitchen stove. Its an older Jenn Air convection/electric range, which is supposedly a nice unit - but it only had two burners on one side, and this stupid and useless grill feature on the other. You cannot heat that much cast iron with electricity. Its just not possible, unless you have all day. So all this time I was cooking with two burners, and it sucked. But, I found that the stove allows you to remove and replace the burner units and Jenn Air hasn't changed to connections in quite some time so I was able to find a replacement two burner unit for the stove and finally get rid of the disgusting grill!














Before: Useless grill! Only two burners! After: Behold the glory of four burners!

In between all of this we found time to go to see the Pats at Buffalo with our friends Sarah and Brandon. Turns out Buffalo's not that far away! Unfortunately, it was not friendly territory for us Pats Fans and on top of that it was a blow out at 56-10! But that's okay we had a lot of fun anyway and I'm sure we'll back again next year!














I would be remiss if I didn't mention the snow...we got a good bit of snow - maybe 10-12 inches or so followed by a few more inches. It's an early snow which is good maybe we'll get to x-country ski this year. At least Max is having fun in it!

Oh Canada!

Well, Fall has approached and is rapidly turning into winter. We went from 80 degrees in the middle of October to more seasonable weather now that its November. At least my plants will stop being confused and actually try to go dormant!

Nate and I have been keeping busy. At the end of September , Nate and I celebrated our one year anniversary. We took a trip around western NY and also into Ontario to Toronto. We started our trip camping in Letchworth State Park. It was the first time that our dog, Max had been camping. As you can see, he really enjoyed himself. He managed to not burn himself in the campfire and he carried his own pack on the trails! Good Dog!
We also went to Rochester (which is a very cool city) where we visited the Seneca Zoo and then we traversed the border into the Great White North. We made a pit stop at Niagara Falls before headed to Toronto. We camped at this great park - Bronte Provincial Park outside of Toronto - it was empty and so clean and they had an awesome system of trails and an off-leash area for dogs. We ran into a very nice native who let her dog play with (or be herded by) Max. Everyone had lots of fun. We were visited during the night by the Canadian striped bear. It tried to get into our cooler and it ate Max's dog food which we foolishly left out.
If we are ever back there, we will be sure to go camping there again.
Toronto was nice - clean for such a large city. We ate lunch on top of the CN tower which has a rotating restaurant. THe food was great and the view was spectacular. It took a little getting used to - Sit and spin, indeed. We also took in the Hockey Hall of Fame and got our hands on the vaunted Stanley Cup! And I even got to try what it feels like to be a goalie - its harder than I make it look, I assure you!
Over all it was a very good vacation, for Nate and me and even for Max. Of course, we couldn't be on vacation for ever - the cats wouldn't let us! So we are back to NY. We got our new XV95 Trane furnace installed (woo hoo!) so we even have heat now. Well, well write more about the house later - for now, I'm going to reminisce about vacaion :)

Summer Trips

Fun pictures today. There is a park not far from us which is on the path of Sullivans march, which was a significant revolutionary event in western NY. Every year, they have a revolutionary war re-enactment, with campsites, vendors and of course, a battle! We only got a few pictures as our battery died, but it was pretty neat.


At least as important to note is that Football season has started! It's a long slow drag through summer with only mid-season baseball on to watch, but now thankfully the Pats are back on TV, and looking pretty good. We are trying to turn our Demon Dog into a pats fan, which appeared to work pretty well, judging by the beating the cheating pats put down on the Chargers.


We also had to return to Illinois for family business, but we did get to see the whole family, which doesn't happen very often. We're awfully spread out across the country, so it's rare that everybody is in the same place. The other big adventure was that Julie got to ride in a corn picker. My mother's family contains a bunch of farmers and a relative hooked her up. Which is a pretty big experience for a city girls who's never been to the midwest!



Enjoy!

Cheap Countertop

You may remember from a previous entry we installed two base cabinets in our laundry room, with the plan of putting a counter top there for folding clothes or whatever else it is you do in there. The expense of buying a solid surface counter top was fairly prohibitive (roughly double the cost of the remodel), so I had decided to make a counter top. I had planned on making a laminate top, when I remembered I had some granite tile that I had bought on clearance somewhere (1$ a tile or so). So I decided to make myself a "granite" countertop using that. I winged it a bit as I didn't know what I was doing. So here's what I did.

First I made my base by screwing 3/8 inch hardiboard to 3/4 inch playwood
I wasn't sure how to attach this, but the hardiboard had a grid on it that looked like it wanted me to put screws there, so I did. I had planned on attaching like I would underlayment, and the grid layout was about the same, so this seemed to work out well. I then attached my tile using thinset, I didn't leave any spaces between the tile, so I didn't need to grout anything. I talked Julie into helping me lug the heavy thing up stairs to the laundry room and attached it to the cabinets. I trimmed out the counter top with 1x2" oak trim that I stained to match the cabinets.
This came out looking pretty nice, but the walls have some wiggle in them, so the edges weren't really tight with the walls. They were close, but there was up to about a 1/8" gap in the worst spot. Not a deal breaker, but large enough to lose things in and didn't look all that nice. I had thought I was going to make a backsplash out of 6" granite tile (just the normal tile cut in half), but 6" looked pretty gigantic, so I decided not to do that afterall. Instead, I got another piece of oak trim and stained and trimmed. I just put a chamger on the edge of the trim to match the edging, made a little corner block and nailed to the wall.
I made little mitered returns at the edges of trim to hide the endgrain, caulked the edges with clear silicone, patted myself on the back and declared it Miller Time (well, Ithaca Beer Company Time, if I'm being honest!).