Floors and the absence of holes

It has been two weeks since I last posted. Sorry.  We have been feeling the honest exhaustion of 8 or more hours of daily physical labor, collapsing into our beds at night, to wake up merely to start at it again. At some point, all this honesty built into wordless hostility on my part, filled with impotent sighs -- which I decided to spare you. But HomoDommi flew home to his family yesterday; I spent the day in a mostly comatose, if upright, state, and today I am feeling merely normally overwhelmed and tired.

The problem with not blogging near-daily about the project is that it is hard to remember what we've accomplished. We are still (sigh) working on the infrastructure of the room. Two days were spent installing a new, stronger, beam to replace the one that shored up the interrupted load-bearing joist, more accurately than we had before (a month and time away showed how we had misaligned our original fix).   So, the incompetence of that plumber 10 years ago cost us over a month in building time, and a deep loss of morale, which we appear only now to be climbing out of.

Speaking of climbing out of holes, several days were spent fixing holes in floors. The most satisfying was replacing the register in floor of the bathroom, above the kitchen. (HomoDommi did all that.)

In the kitchen, two holey spots were reasonably small -- where plumbing used to snake up from the cellar to the old sink position, and another corner mysteriously simply absent of subflooring. Fixing the kitchen floor holes is like filling in a 3-dimensional jigsaw puzzle: first 2x4s are hammered in between joists in the basement ceiling to combat gravity, and then you find scrap wood to match the 13/16ths inch rough subflooring boards, and lastly top it off with remnants of 100-year old tongue-and-groove floorboards from an antiques and restoration store. (Matching not for looks, but for depth. Modern floorboards are a shade thicker, leading to unevenness.  All these spots will be obscured by cabinetry or covered with floating cork floor in any case.)

(Not much to look at, but it was very satisfying to finish this space. It is level and strong.)

The largest hole was the 3 year old gap left by the chimney removal, a space filled with electrical wires and plumbing, right next to a doorway, so we've had to step around it all this time.  Even now, with the floor in, I still walk around the area. HomoDommi secured 90% of this floor-fill, which has to be strong enough to hold, on one corner, the edge of our refrigerator, and I did the top layer.

At the wall at the back of this former-hole, you'll see an expanse of shiny metal. That is perhaps our most impressive construction, a laundry chute.  It runs from the back of a closet on the top floor down to the basement. If we have any energy left later, we will add a little door to it in the kitchen, for dishcloths.  The last floor hole to be filled was at the top of the chute, in the closet floor upstairs.

There is now a solid floor elled around the metal chute, although it still needs a layer of tongue-and-groove flooring to bring it to the level of the hallway floor. I took on this task towards the end of our push, and was so tired that thinking in three-dimensional space was beyond me. The particular difficulty here is that the bottom of the hole is 9 feet off the floor of the kitchen (a bit taller than me on our ladder), and the upper part of the hole is partially covered by the hallway flooring. That means filling it has to be done from above, while lying prone on the floor and holding heavy drills sideways over a 9 foot deep hole. In other words, this hole was filled by trial-and-error, with much swearing and huffing, and finally a brief visit from HomoDommi who restructured my hours of tinkering to be more solid and level in 15 minutes. The chute itself at the moment remains capped (for fire safety purposes) and once there is time to think about non-kitchen things, we will come up with a child-proof, fire-safe, door for it.