The Pine Floor - Part Deux

The paint is finally done in Eric's office.  We ended up hybridizing a Benjamin Moore colour called Versailles:

The wonderful Lea at Centre Decor Hudson is a paint PRO.  I've heard of Lea through the community grape-vine, but we've never patronized her paint shop until now.  Wow, were we impressed!  She's a real artisan and managed to capture Eric's wish perfectly.  We both love the result.  Lea managed to balance the strength of blue and purple so that neither colour was dominant.  What's unfortunate is my inability to capture the colour properly with my camera!  It's far too blue in the photos further below, but it's all I've got!

Hark!  What do we have here?  We're about to find out!  And once again, this photo drives home the point WHY we're repainting the floor instead of leaving it au naturel.  There are so many holes, dents, scratches, pings, patches, etc., that natural beauty is obscured by years of abuse.

Oh well.  Gee.  A nice groove cut into the floor.  For what, we've no clue.  Maybe electrical wiring?  Maybe some sort of prehistoric plumbing attempt?  In our house, from our experience, anything is possible.  We've seen it all.  Eric is going to clean it out, countersink the nails that broke off, sand it to the level of the rest of the floor, fill everything in with epoxy (Eric's specialty), and once it's painted white, you'll never know it was there.

Note the red lid beside the small crowbar and broom in the photo below.  We have no clue what was here once, perhaps a toilet, but it's yet another hole that needs to be repaired.  Eric is going to make a plug out of wood for this, and ordered a 1/2" rabbet set from Lee Valley, so I'll be sure to post how he goes about fixing this.

When I removed the shellac in the guest room last January, I used a heat gun because the shellac had a nasty habit of splintering.  It was easy enough to get a 1" spackling knife underneath the thick coat of shellac, but unless it was softened by the heat gun, it would splinter into hundreds of shards.  Here we are in August, and maybe our hot weather softened up the finish a bit, because it was much easier to work with.

Eric treated himself to a new tool which helped our progress in removing the shellac: the Fein MultiMaster. Now, here's a tool we should have bought AGES ago!  We were actually fighting over who got to use it!  Once our tug-o'-war over the MultiMaster ended, we attacked the floor, and estimated we had the entire finish removed in about 6 hours or so.  This is THE TOOL if you're renovating an old house, its uses are only limited by the imagination.   Seriously, we were sitting there using it, saying, hey, if only we had this tool earlier, wow, we could have saved ourselves a lot of blood, sweat and tears.  (It's not that tragic, just sayin'.)

We bought model FMM250Q, either the special or limited edition version that is currently being marketed by Fein Canada.  The Fein MultiMaster is built in Germany, and it's tough.  We looked at the comparable Bosch model, but after some research, we were quickly sold on the Fein.  They made it first, and they make it best, as far as we were concerned.  We own other Bosch tools (I think a huge drill and a reciprocating saw), but the Fein outshone Bosch in the multi-tool department.  We are in love!

The tool was not cheap, I think this edition retails for CAD$349, which when our crazy sales tax is added comes to around $400.  That's a LOT of money for a tool, but we feel it's worth it given what we still need to do upstairs, in the barns and with our old boat (a thought I need to repress).

Here's a close-up of the blade we used to remove the shellac which came off in sheets we could actually pick up and throw into the garbage bag.  Sweet!  Seriously, this was the first time we were shouldering each other out of the way to use a tool:  LET ME, NO, NOOOOO, I WANNA USE IT, LEAVE IT, LEMMEEEEEE...we were acting like juveniles.

You need hearing protectors to use the tool, but it's not an aggressive sound that will make others in the room run for cover.  I could easily sweep up the room while Eric used the tool with hearing protectors.  The only caveat both of us noticed is that it's easy to get carried away and use it for an hour or so non-stop, and only when you pry your hand off the tool do you realize the vibration does affect your fingers and hand.  I've been operated for carpal tunnel on my right hand so I'm careful with tools; using the MultiMaster was not the least bit uncomfortable, but I wouldn't go using it for, say, a three-hour grout removing marathon.

So, the next step is repairing the carved groove, filling in the 6" hole, plugging three 1" holes, one 2" hole, and a variety of other pings and dents.  There was also a lot of plastic wood we removed between the boards that will need to be epoxied.  Nothing really major, just time consuming.  But we'll get there eventually.

The Pine Floor Update

Well, here we are several hours later. I had hoped to sand 14 boards in the guest bedroom, (I'm very goal oriented like that!), but in the end, my arms gave up so I only managed to finish about half of that. Basically I've proven yet again the golden rule of home renovation time estimation: Estimate X hours = 2*X. Or something like that.

That little bit of algebra aside, sanding the part of the floor that had absolutely no finish on whatsoever went great. I actually ended up using 40-grit sandpaper, and my fave Porter and Cable 1/2 sheet orbital finishing sander. The box says, "vibration free", which I am here to tell you, unless you're made of rubber, is an utter misnomer. Also, the paper clogged frequently, even using 40-grit, and this had me cursing. Changing the paper in the P and C sander is a real pain in the butt, unless you've got 3 hands.

I had the window open a crack, and had the shop vac going nearly the entire time, so the dust was not that prohibitive. I always wear hearing protection and a high-quality carbon filter mask, but even with a well-adjusted mask, there was still a lot of dust in the inside the mask at the end of the day.

The little milking stool comes in very handy when doing jobs like this. Some days, I'd like to have it permanently attached to my posterior. Sitting on this bench makes any task not-quite-ergonomic, but infinitely superior to kneeling.

On that note, I leave you with today's sunset:

Enjoy!

The Pine Floor

We've been debating about what to do with the pine floor in the guest room. I'd like to see it painted white, rather than covered, so Eric creatively put the following mandate on my plate:

DO IT YOURSELF! (Uh, thanks hon!)

Here's a photo of what I'm dealing with (and yes, I wear orange shoes):


You'll notice that part of the floor was varnished, and where we tore down the dividing walls and closets, the floor had never been finished, hence the two differing colours. There are also lots of holes from the massive nails used to nail in the divisions:

These will have to be filled with a 2-part epoxy, and I have a lot of them to do! It's too bad that most of this filling-work is going to be covered by the new IKEA closet...but I can't stomach the idea of leaving it the way it is without fixing it. I call it "integrity"; you might call this "a waste of time", or "stupidity". Well, we'll see who comes out first, says I.

Since we had intended on covering the entire floor with either carpet or laminate or hardwood, we haven't exactly been careful with the floor, and we've dropped many a tool:

There are lots of pings and dents like above. My approach to the floor is this: it's too crooked for laminate or cork or bamboo, and definitely too crooked for hardwood unless we shim the living daylights out of it. Carpet is well...carpet. What I liked costed about $10 a square foot, and then we're still looking at underpadding and installation charges. Plus we have Cooper and the cats and with the mud that abounds in spring, I just don't need one more worry. It's hard enough keeping them off the furniture.

My thinking is this: it's just grunt-work, this sanding and filling, and sanding some more. A couple of coats of paint, a bit of wait time, and we're done! If the end result isn't what we imagined, well, we can always cover it with something else. We'll just be out the cost of paint. I can live with that.

So wish me luck. I'm off to put on my grubby work clothes, crack open the window a bit to get a bit of air circulation going, and don my carbon-filter mask. I just hope I don't sand the power cord of the sander into oblivion like I did last time!

Check in later for preliminary sanding results!

The Stairway from Hell

Our old staircase was a blight in an otherwise wonderful living room. Let’s face it, we were ashamed. People would invariably come into our house, and their crest-fallen face would hone in on our staircase, and they’d exclaim, “Ugh, what are you going to do with THAT?”

They were right of course, the old staircase was an eyesore:



Everyone’s first question: why don’t you just repaint it? Then the next question was equally impractical: why don’t you re-build it?

Nearly every baluster was broken, the steps had been sanded into oblivion, the stringers had separated where the stair turned 90º, and initially, in our optimistic view to restore things to order and out of sheer respect for “the old way”, we thought we’d rebuild it exactly as it was.

And then we thought things over. We couldn’t fit a king-sized bed upstairs, (which we needed, of course, to accommodate the DOG sleeping with us), a sofa barely fits upstairs, and basically, the over-all dimensions were kind of Lilliputian in scale. People were smaller 150 years ago. We’re no giants, but really…the stair need super-sizing to bring it up to par.

In the general scheme of our renovation, the staircase was the absolute LAST thing we wanted to do. We still need to renovate the upstairs, (we’re living in uninsulated knotty pine purgatory), and this would mean lots of trips up and down with what we’ve torn out, plus all the building material we need to bring up. Doing this with a pristine staircase is just too impractical. But when we happened on a hand-worker who was able to make a staircase to our exacting specifications, we deviated from our schedule and gave the green light. Big Mistake. Actually, we wanted him to repair our barn, but since it was November and winter was nipping at our heels, we thought it best to put the plans for the barn off until spring. Being suckers, when he told us stairs were his specialty and the fact he was desperate for work, we gave the go-ahead.

It was the end of November, and we were assured the whole fiasco would last about 2 to 3 weeks. Perfect, just in time for Christmas, I thought. I already had visions of pine garlands decking our fine new stair, our new pride and joy being shown off to Christmas revelers.

Alas, nothing ever goes to plan, and from experience, we know that every best time estimate can be doubled, if not tripled in length of time until completion. But, this time we reckoned, we were dealing with a pro, a master craftsman, an enthusiastic worker who came to us like manna from heaven.

We ordered oak for the steps, used our reclaimed Eastern fir for the stringers, and ordered 30 custom-turned balusters made of ash. Our worker became more and more sporadic, and weeks turned into months…

But alas, when we went into the workshop, we were mollified. The steps were wonderful, the design of the stringers was curvaceous and elegant, the balusters veritable works of art. We could hardly wait for the installation.

At the beginning of March, the day to tear down the old stair and re-build the wall was finally here. Eric and the stair-builder demolished the old stairs, tore out the bead-board that was our inside finishing, and proceeded to remove the pine boards that form the guts of our very uninsulated outside wall. Essentially (and this is where I laugh when people suggest “it just needs some paint”), the inside walls of our house are comprised of pine boards, about 1” thick, nailed vertically onto the main structure of the house with hand-forged nails.



After 150 years or so, the wood has shrunken so much you can literally pull the square nails out without effort. I didn’t mention insulation, did I? That’s because there is no insulation! Eric painstakingly removed all the old pine boards, replaced those that were rotten, placing one layer of heavy-duty tar-paper behind them.



He then re-installed the boards with screws and washers, and build a 2”x3” stud wall that was insulated with Roxul Flexibatt and covered with a vapour barrier called Ayr-Foil:



On top of this came the fire-code Gyproc, and we now have us a finished wall.

The only thing missing is the stair.

In the meanwhile, our two tough boy cats, Bobby (below) and Howard, high-tailed it outside, and spent their time looking longingly into the house through a variety of windows, in the hopes the stairs have magically rebuilt themselves.



Our ancient cat Schatzie is pushing 20, and she spent the entire time sleeping within 20 feet of power tools and wrecking bars, completely oblivious to the commotions around her. We spend a total of 3 nights climbing the ladder to sleep upstairs, and the old hag was the only cat who climbed the ladder. Mind you, the moment she discovered the stair was missing, it was as though a little light bulb went off above her head. It was as though she was saying, “damn, where’d the stair go? How am I gonna get my treats?” When I showed her the ladder, up she went. The old girl is fearless. (Her mother’s not, so I promptly slung her over my shoulder and carried her back down, where she spent the next 2 days sleeping on the sofa, opening an eye from time to time to watch the show.)

When the bottom stringer was placed against the wall, we could envision the stair as almost complete:



But we have a problem, and it’s starting to dawn on Mr. Stair-builder: he messed up a measurement. His calculations were bang-on; he should have had 19.85 cm between each step:



It seems when he started to build the stringers, he measured 18.85 cm between each step (remember Norm Abram’s advice: measure twice, cut once?). Now, you’re saying, 1 cm, that’s like…a fraction of an inch, right? And you’re right of course, but when you multiply 1 centimetre over 14 steps, you’re off by 14 centimetres.

So, our new stair is on blocks, and we’re not, um…very pleased. In fact, we’re near tears:



We’re scratching our heads, trying valiantly to find a solution, but alas, there’s no salvaging the hard work. There’s not enough room to properly add a step or build a landing. The run of the stair is totally wrong. Not only that, the 4th stair up is 10 cm higher than it should be because of the measuring error, meaning anyone over 6' needs to duck under the beam. One of our friends put it best: you’ll break a hip when you’re older. And, of course, she’s totally right.

Naturally, being the lyrical deviant I am, Pat Benatar's song "Heartbreaker" came to mind, sung with the following lyrics:

You're a hip-breaker, time-waster,
money-taker, don't you mess around with me,
OH NO NO NO...

Despite the best of intentions, not everything turns out like you’ve planned. Some things you have to live with and other things just need to be re-done.

But we’re not finished yet! We’ve been VERY patient over the past few months, dealing with a moody yet methodical worker. Eric was willing to absorb the cost of the wood: we’d need new stringers and new oak posts, as well as the banister. The actual steps could be re-used and so could the balusters, however, everything else needed to be re-built. We were willing to house our worker (hell, I was already feeding him 3 squares a day and doing his laundry), until the staircase was re-built, alas, his head-space "wasn’t there" and he was "too disappointed" to tackle the project again.

So. We have a beautiful staircase. It’s just built for the wrong house.