The Floor is Done!!! (Part 2)

Has the suspense been killing you?

Probably not. You'd be pretty weird if you cared as much about our floor as I do.

Well... the third coat of gloss went on today (thanks to Tom's mammoth effort), so it's officially done!

So now it's gone from this:

To this after sanding:

To this (from a slightly different angle, but still looking diagonally towards the back wall of the house)!!!

Looks fantastic from that angle, huh?! If you ignore the well-and-truly stained and not-yet removed masking tape along the walls, and the fact that we have yet to get rid of that ikky yellow.

I've been having a crazy week at work this week, so Tom has been slaving away at finishing this on his own getting the floor done (with a bit of help from our respective brothers, Daniel and Phil). I still haven't actually seen it in person since the gloss coats went on, which almost seems sacrilegious!

Here's the process. I had grand plans for the floor to look something like this:

sourced from Euro Style Floors

Or this would have suited me fine:

sourced from Floor Installers

So we bought a dark chocolate coloured stain - called English Walnut by Solver. They actually mixed it with double the colouring so we wouldn't have to do more than one coat of the stain.

After preparing the floor we started staining.

I did a little happy dance as the first few strokes went on, as it looked exactly as I'd hoped.

The instructions were to let it sit for 15 minutes, and then wipe off the excess with a rag, which we did (most of the time).

Here's the whole living area floor stained (don't worry, we didn't start putting things on top of it until it had dried a bit).

Then we hit a snag. As it dried, it looked less and less like stained timber, and more and more like timber painted patchily with black paint. Not exactly the look we were going for. We don't know if we shouldn't have left it to dry for 15 minutes before wiping, or whether the double hit of paint in the stain made it too thick, or whether we applied too thick a coating, but not only did the entire stain take about three times the recommended drying time to actually dry (and even then you'd kind of stick to it a bit when you walked on it), it really did not look great.

So, with considerable disappointment, we reevaluated our options:
1) To sand it all off and start again (*groan*)
2) To give up and pay a professional to sort it out (*also groan*)
3) To try to sand it back lightly to take off the surface level of paint before applying gloss and hope it would turn out nicely.

We decided to go with option number 3. So Tom gave it a go with the floor sander with really fine sandpaper, but it started scraping it off badly, so that plan didn't work, and required a bit of a stain repair job. So... Tom returned the sander to the hire place and hired an orbital sander instead that was much better for this kind of application. And he got to work, as always.

We were a bit concerned about the result. It ended up looking pretty similar to this rustic-looking table.

sourced from Make Your House a Home

Not exactly the look we were going for when you compare it to this photo from above:

sourced from Euro Style Floors

But I figured that it did look interesting, and was hopeful that adding three coats of gloss would deepen it a bit and smooth out some of the inconsistencies. Plus I REEEEEALLY didn't want to explore options 1 or 2 from above.

So Tom applied the first coat of gloss on Tuesday afternoon, allowing it to dry overnight before applying the next coat yesterday morning, and the final coat yesterday afternoon after the required 8 hours of drying time.

Here's our  bedroom with the lovely glossy floor.

The view from the other angle. You can see the variations in colour a bit better here.

 

The view into the second bedroom:

And the view across the lounge room into the dining room again.

The gloss is amazingly thin. Tom let some of it sit and dry in his paint tray overnight, and when he peeled it away the next morning, this is what it looked like:

So that's it! the floor is done! And although it's not exactly what I wanted, I don't think it's half bad. It's certainly an amazing improvement on the orange-ey colour it was before! And hopefully that extra glossy finish will protect the soft floorboards from the rigours of real life, which is the most important thing, because they were ridiculously easy to dent.

Like the painting of our bedroom, this has been a relatively quick total transformation, although it doesn't really feel like it since we've practically lived and breathed the floor 24/7 for a week now. It's made a ginormous difference! Plus, we're now tantalisingly close to being able to move back in again!

Tom still needs to plumb in a makeshift kitchen sink for us so that even if we have no kitchen whatsoever we can still wash dishes, plumb in the wastes for said kitchen sink and the toilet, shower etc (which is going to be interesting since having slid the entire house forward the connection to the sewerage pipe is a little distance from the house itself now), put up a temporary fence for Allie, and tidy up any other loose ends we can think of.

Hooray for progress!

Getting there...

On our quiet Sunday we cut up the VJ boards to try to get closer to finishing off the West Wall in our kitchen.

Tom has had a bit of time off this week, so decided to take advantage of that during-the-week noise-making time to nail up some of the boards he'd cut on the weekend.

Before that though, remember how the roof sheets on our little kitchen extension were sagging in the middle a bit?

And how I said I had an idea about how to fix them? Well I suggested we slide some kind of thin (but sturdy) sheeting in between the roof panels and the beams underneath them to support the sheets across the middle.

So Tom snapped to action, as always.

Allie, on the other hand, decided a snooze on the back steps was a more sensible idea.

Thankfully we remembered to put up some insulation, since of course this wall (and roof) faces West, meaning it bears the brunt of the afternoon sun.

And then Tom installed some thin pine battens.

And then we were ready for the VJs.

So we're nearly there! The next step is to get that gap on the left filled with windows, and for that we need to relocate the window sill from the North wall of the kitchen. You can kind of see it here once Tom removed the trim from underneath the window, to the left of Tom's crowbar.

It's proving to be pretty solidly locked into the wall, so it's going to take either some serious ingenuity or considerable brute force to get it out. Until we manage that, we can't finish off the rest of the West Wall, so we'd better figure it out soon!

And in the meantime, Tom has been working very hard on getting the floor finished (see Part 1 here), and I know everyone's probably dying of curiosity to see it completed...

No? Just me?

Well you'll get to see it anyway soon, taking it from this:

 

To this once sanded:

 

To...... wait and see!!!!

Ssshh!

Image sourced from freaking marketing

It's no secret that now we're owner builders we're only allowed to make noise at our house between 6:30am and 6:30pm Monday through Saturday, with absolute silence required on Sunday. It seems pretty ridiculous considering that you would expect owner builders to have day jobs, so cutting their weekend down by half is a bit mean. Nevertheless, those are the rules, so unless we want a $1,000 fine (which we almost definitely would get given how diligent our angry neighbour is with complaining to council), we are making no noise on Sundays. No sanding, no drilling, no hammering, nothing.

That's not to say that we've found this easy! It puts an incredible amount of pressure on our Saturday since it's our only full noise-making day. This was particularly annoying yesterday, since we'd hired our floor sander for the full weekend, but couldn't use it because it makes too much noise. So we finished the sanding by hand, and scratched our chins over what else we could achieve without making noise.

And then it hit us! We could measure up the rest of the boards we needed to enclose our West Wall extension, and then pay a visit to our neighbours near our second house, and do a quick bit of timber cutting there!!! So we lined it up with our wonderful ex-neighbours, borrowed a power cord, and Tom got cutting.

I also made a nice little discovery on the side of the road (yes, I've suddenly turned into one of those weird people that pick random things up from people's footpaths) that I'll talk about soon.

In the meantime, aren't we ingenious?

Love Bec

Plumbing

One of the items in the big long list of things we have to do before we can move back into our house is to re-plumb the house, since the house raisers cut away a lot of the existing plumbing (which was pretty old and asking for replacement anyway). While waiting for the floor stain to dry (full details to come soon), Tom decided to attack this job.

He paid a visit to Bunnings to purchase all of the necessary bits and pieces.

Which Allie had to inspect before approving use.

Tom either explaining something or looking shocked at the items in his hands.

One cannot install plumbing without one’s fierce face on.

Fixing a connection.

A thunderstorm threatened to hit, so Allie took cover inside the car.

The fully installed copper piping.

And a close-up of the new connections.

So now we’ve just got to get it all checked out by a plumber, and then provided that the power gets reconnected soon (which is out of our hands and into the hands of bureaucracy), here’s hoping we can move in really really soon!

Transforming the Floor - Part 1

We're really in unchartered territory here - for us at least. The floor at our house has been well-used, and not so well-loved over the years. It's made of Oregon, which is a soft timber, so every time anything heavy was dropped on it (or the previous tenant clip clopped around in her high heels), tiny dents were made in the floor. So, we had to do something to give it a bit more protection, and I certainly wasn't a big fan of the orange-ey colour of the existing stain.

Plus, when we opened up the little kitchen add-on it was clear that it had missed the original staining process, so if we wanted it to match the rest of the kitchen floor, we had to do something. You can see the difference in colour and finish in the bottom corner of this photo:

And a better view of the original kitchen add-on near me in this photo:

So, we decided in the last week or so that if we were going to do it, we should do it now, before we move back into the house. And true to form, we decided to do it ourselves. How hard can it be, right?

First step is hammering in all of the existing nails in the floor so that they don't stick out and rip up the sander when you go over them. This process took FOREVER, and I have a purple finger to show for it (no jokes about how bad my aim is please, the sheer volume of nails we hammered in inevitably meant I missed a few times).

Here I am hammering away one day after work. Yes, I'm so dedicated I didn't even change my clothes to do it.

Allie of course had to check that Tom was doing it right.

Once this was finally done (don't underestimate how long this takes), we were ready to start sanding.

Tom sprinkled kerosene around (according to this DIY video from Bunnings that's what you should do before sanding).

And then he got to work on the sander, starting with 40 grit sandpaper on the first sand, to get as much of the glossy finish off as possible.

He managed to get the kitchen and dining rooms sanded on Friday afternoon before our 6:30pm noise curfew hit.

And on Saturday morning the sanding continued...

Of course it was a stinking hot day, so we hooked up an extremely sophisticated cooling system...

Here's the freshly sanded kitchen add-on. You can hardly tell the difference between the stained and the unstained floorboards now, huh?

Daniel and Phil had the job of using little sanders to sand all of the edges of the rooms that the big sander couldn't reach.

 

 

It all became a bit much for Phil.

Allie pronounced him Dead on Arrival.

Here's a good view of the nail holes. These all had to be filled with putty once the heavy sanding was done.

So the boys started trying to decipher the instructions on the putty container.

And we all got to work. Just like the nail hammering, don't underestimate how time consuming this is!

Then the boys had to sand over the dried putty.

 

We ran out of time before our noise curfew on Saturday to sand all of the putty, so we had to finish that off on Sunday by hand (i.e. without any kind of machine).

Then we had to clean the floor of all of the sawdust...

And spread methylated spirits over the floor to stop the oregon from releasing any resin up onto the surface.

And the final step before staining? Masking!

Stay tuned for the staining!