Category: House stuff

Our living room has turned into our bedroom now as phase 2 of the flooring project begins. Got everything moved out of the room last night, and today the rug and tack strips will come up and down goes the roofing felt.

Then the next step will be to figure out just how we’re going to mirror the octagonal tray ceiling on the floor. The wife and I both have different ideas about how to do it. Her plan seems pretty intricate and involved to me, and pretty far above my rudimentary skills with power tools. My plan is simpler, but still above my rudimentary skills.

It will probably require more tools too. Go figure.

The house next door has gone back on the market already. The people living there were just renting the place waiting for their house to be finished. Nice enough folks. Maybe the people who buy it will actually live there instead of turning it into another rental like many of the other places around here.

It’s a nice enough house with a nice big porch out front and 2 levels. A little bit smaller than ours but without the wide open floor plan like ours (one of the reasons we didn’t put it on our list). I remember walking through it while it was still being built and checking it out to compare with ours.

The selling price is a whole other matter all together. The asking price is almost 10% higher than what we paid for ours and I think at least 15% higher than what the house was originally listed at. It would be interesting to find out how much it ends up going for.

Buying a house is pretty similar to having a cascade failure in your life. You know those situations where one part of the machine fails, causing another part to fail and then another until the whole thing blows up in your face.

First thing you do is buy a house. If it’s a new house, you probably need to get a mailbox and post. Then you need to buy stuff to maintain the house. You have a lawn, so you need a hose and sprinkler or two. Then you find fire ants, so you need to buy stuff to get rid of them. Then you need to get a ladder so you can change bulbs and fire alarm batteries. Now leaves and crap start collecting on the lawn, so you need a rake to gather them up and bags to collect them in. After a few weeks the grass starts growing so then you need to get a mower.

And it goes on and on and on. Just one thing leading to another and another and another.

And then there are the home renovation/improvement projects. Hoo boy, does that ever set up a major cascade. First you figure out what tools and supplies you need to star the project. Tools are expensive, so to justify having them around, you come up with more projects to work on. But each project requires one more tool/gadget in addition to what you have already. And then in short order you’ve got a whole workshop of tools and no workbench or storage place to put them all, which means more garage clutter.

In no time half of your two car garage is filled with stuff and is starting to encroach on the other half. I guess this is why I see so many cars parked out in the driveway instead of inside the garage.

Except for the transition strips and shoe molding at the baseboards, phase 1 of the flooring project is done! The office, bedroom, hallway and associated closets are done at last, taking several days longer than I anticipated.

So, as soon as I was finished nailing in the last board, dear wife of mine says “Lets start on the bedroom!” So off to the store once again to order another 184 sq ft of wood and transition strips to finish everything off. Hopefully it will go a little faster this time around.

Lessons I learned installing the floor:

• Go with 3/4″ wood if you can afford it. 3/8″ is a pain.
• Make sure all your lines are straight.
• Experiment with the nailer on some scrap to make sure the air pressure for your pneumatic nailer is adjusted properly. 3/8″ planks crack easily and it’s not hard to drive your nails right through the board if your pressure is too high.
• Be careful nailing. It doesn’t take much to crack or break off the tongues of 3/8″ flooring.
• Make sure your boards and cuts are straight. Bends propagate and you end up with gaps between rows if you’re not careful.
• When you start another area (like a closet), start at the end you just finished and square off against that. Otherwise you may end up being crooked when you reach the room you just finished.
• Get knee pads. With 3/8″ boards, you’re likely to end up spending much of your time tapping, hammering or otherwise convincing the boards to go into place.

Finished with the floor in another room! This one only took us a total of about 9 hours to do. So now all that’s left is the closet in this room, the hallway, the two little linen closets and the transitions between the different areas. Not much left now, and it should go pretty quickly. After this, we think about doing our bedroom.