Utterly Floored

So! While the outside of our house was in the process of being utterly painted, we were working on getting a few more things inside 'utterly' finished.

Next on the list? The downstairs floors!

While we were frantically painting the ceiling after the plasterers finished it, we didn't have to worry too much about drop sheets because the floors consisted of this basic yellow-tongue composite board.

Our goal was to try to get most of the walls completely painted too before the flooring guys were booked to come in, but there just aren't enough weekends for that So the white undercoated walls remained as the floorboards went in, and we would just have to use dropsheets or be extremely careful for the rest of the painting.

As with every decision we've made with this house, there was quite a lot of dithering involved before  coming to the ultimate choice. I knew from the start that I wanted a timber floor, to keep a bit of the Queenslander weatherboard house consistency happening from upstairs to downstairs, particularly since we opted for plasterboard instead of the VJ board walls in the extension, so we really needed to bring some timber in there.

We considered laminate flooring (on the cheaper end of the spectrum) that has a wood look about it, and although the price was good, I was struggling to come to terms with its plasticky feel. We then very briefly considered real wood floors, and then promptly scrapped that option, since it was about four times the price. After all, this is only a little granny flat under the house we're working with, not the Taj Mahal!

And then, we stumbled across bamboo.

Source

In my view, it was the perfect compromise. It's real wood rather than plastic, so it doesn't have that tinny plastic sound when you tap it with your fingernails, but because it doesn't take hundreds of years to grow (not even close) it's still very reasonably priced when compared with hardwoods. Plus, it's very renewable, which makes it more environmentally friendly. The one downside was that it only came in two colours (unless you got it stained, which we heard not-particularly-great reports about) - a very pale blonde colour, or the honey brown colour that comes from heating it and caramelising the wood a bit.

I had been hoping to come a bit closer in colour to the stain we used on the upstairs floors which was considerably darker, but we decided that we could live with the lighter colour of the honey brown for the sake of the real timber + lower cost equation.

So with the decision made and the boards purchased, the flooring guys turned up on Monday morning and snapped into action, pun intended!

And by the end of the day, we had a transformation on our hands!

How about a side by side before and after, just for fun?

It never ceases to amaze me how each little detail makes such a gigantic difference towards making it feel like a real house!

And the transformation in the other rooms was just as good. The master bedroom...

The corridor leading to the second bedroom...

And back to the lounge and kitchen.

In what was a complete fluke, the colour of the floorboards actually almost matches the colour of the kitchen cabinets perfectly, which makes everything feel very intentional and cohesive. Got to love unintentional surprises that make things look intentional!

I'm very relieved that taking a chance on a slightly lesser known product has paid off so well. I'm so happy with the bamboo. And as an added bonus, apparently it's also very hard-wearing and strong, so won't dent and chip as easily as our soft timber boards upstairs do.

Anyone else got an opinion on bamboo floorboards?

Step to It

It's high time I returned to our situation downstairs and gave you an update.

We'd lived through the disastrous day when we found out we had to raise our floors (and ceilings) up about 35cm, we'd ripped out ceilings and raised windows and doorways, and we'd even got a head start on the painting, but there was one very important thing missing.

Our new floors! They arrived looking like this.

Well, part of them did.

I wasn't quick enough to capture the other part of them before the carpenters had them cut to size and in position. Got to be quick round here!

We had worked out that those joists, which were about 30cm high, plus the yellowtongue boards that would go on top, plus my eventual flooring material on top would equate to just a little over our required floor height. Hooray for being able to use pre-fabricated materials and not having to custom make something at the right height!

When the yellowtongue went in, suddenly it felt like it had been like that all along!

The doors and windows all felt like they were at the right height again, not like someone was playing a strange Alice-in-Wonderland-ish trick on us.

 

Although of course there was this giant step-up from the garage into the lounge that was a little odd...

And the extra high front doorway with a couple of weatherboards below it from the front of the house (if you can look past all those ugly stacked tables in the front yard).

And there is now quite a significant drop down into the bathroom. Because of the fact that we wouldn't be able to nail joists and new flooring into that room without penetrating the waterproofing membrane, we decided that we would get the tiler to lay an extra deep bed beneath his tiles in order to raise the height of the floor in there. But there will still be a step down from the hallway into that room. Unavoidable, unfortunately!
 

It's pretty amazing what can change in a day! But there is someone that is even more impressed than I am with the new floor arrangement.

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!

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!