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.

Update: Kitchen Floor Stripping

After a break of four months, I returned this week to scraping down the kitchen floor. If you recall, when we stripped off the 1950's linoleum, which was buckled and cracked, etched with decades of dirt and impossible to clean, we exposed stripes of black material covering the original old-growth fir floor.

(Okay, I don't know if it is old-growth fir, and in any case, it was never top-of-the-line fir, because it was the floor of a kitchen, and Craftsmen houses of 1915 didn't expend a lot of energy on the look of the kitchen, except to make it appear clean. There are lots of knotholes in this floor, one almost as big as my fist, that open direct to the basement, so it's not top-grade. But in 1915, I don't know how much non-old-growth fir was being used. There were so many trees! Cut down the big ones first, it's more efficient and economical.)

In August, I started pouring CitruStrip on the floor, leaving it covered with plastic for an hour, and then scraping it off. Then the children came home from their maternal-side vacation and I didn't want to have even this "organically toxic" stuff in the house with them. But with work on the attic on hold until the contractor is done with the upstairs closet (more about the attic in another blog entry), it occurred to me that this was something to be finished during the hours when the children are in school.

I'm now just one 5 x 2 foot stretch from a smooth floor. I believe the black material is just paper, and underneath it is linoleum glue. I'm starting to think, now that I'm almost done, that all the CitruStrip does is hold moisture against the paper long enough for the water to dissolve everything (the gel, with plastic wrap over it) -- because when I scrape off the paper, there is still a thick dark residue on the boards that I have to mop off (with lots of water and repeated cleanings). The mopping raises the grain on the wood, possibly pushing out the glue? However, no amount of wetting the black stuff and then scraping will chip it off, so even if the chemical in the gel is offering no extra help, the gel alone is worth the cost of the product. We might have been able to sand it off, but the black material would gum up the sand-paper quickly, so we would have been paying as much for sand-paper. I'm much happier with this method and then sanding only wood to get it truly smooth.

A friend pointed out that if we can keep the fir floors, the house will have more resale value than if we put in the click-together cork floor. I think that's probably true, and it might look better, too. And we have other rooms for the cork -- the basement (a bedroom, the laundry room or the yet-to-be-built multi-media room) or HomoDomi's studio, perhaps? And the contractor has commented a couple of times on the shape of the floor -- he thinks we could fix it up to look pretty wonderful.

On the Eighth Day, We Finished the Porch

Technically, we only worked on solely the porch for six days, but we feel as if we started on it last Tuesday, when we bought the lumber. (If you recall, we then finished other projects and fought the heat for a couple of days before starting). But however long it took, the main part is done now.

We started the end with a couple of new boards -- 14' 2x6s, which we used to form an extra strut to support the porch floor. It turns out that Home Depot is geared towards contractors (okay, we're slow). It cost $10 for these two humongous boards -- it would have cost $8 for boards half that length. So it's cheaper to buy in bulk. Andrew said it was dicey driving home with wood sticking this far out of the car.

We also rented Andrew's current favorite tool, an Angle Nail Hammer. This is a totally cool sort-of stapler which you position over the porch board and then whack with a hammer (once if you're big and beefy, three times if you're wimpy and at the end of the day). It drives a nail-like staple in at a perfect 45 degree angle, affixing your porch board permanently to whatever you're hammering it on to (which very occasionally, unfortunately, is not the thing you intended to hammer it on to).

We decided in the end to solve the length problem with a 10" wide "threshold" in front of the door (a slab of pine) -- so in front of the door, we only needed the 7' boards. You can see the white board in place under/in front of the door in the picture. For the 40 inch space to the left of the door we pieced porch boards together to make 8' combinations with 7' planks. This involved sawing the boards into combinations that would add up to 8' and which coincided with where there was a strut to nail it to and which kept the seams far from the rain danger of the front of the porch (leaving only the options of 1' + 7' and 2' + 6'). This meant that I learned how to use the Skilsaw, so that Andrew could be punching the Angle Nail Hammer on one board as I prepped the next.

The final product is very fine. It is thrilling to walk on this tight, non-creaking, solid surface, that we put together ourselves in only a few hours. There is some metaphor in the fact that we were able to repair and build the floor underneath our feet. Perhaps it is particularly poignant to us because we spent several days in the "pit" created by the porch walls, so we are quite aware of how the porch floor is 3 feet above ground. To me, it still feels like I'm walking in air when I walk across it.

The work is not entirely finished of course. We would just stain the wood if the whole porch were in this pretty wood, but half is still the old green, so the whole thing will be painted. So next, there is patching, priming, and painting (butter yellow) to do (my job) while Andrew finishes the balustrade and the railing down the steps.

More about Floors - Kitchen

No work was done on the porch or the garden on Saturday because Andrew was at an all-day PTA Leadership Training Meeting, and Mel was painting someone else's house with REACH, for charity. I turned the radio on loud and started stripping the remainder of the linoleum goo off the kitchen floor. Aside from some aches and pains from two days on hands and knees, and a head full of "Angel in the Morning" and "Like a Virgin" (I gotta change that radio station), it's been a success to balance the frustration of the porch.

When Carolyn visited in February, we three ripped up the wrinkled and warped linoleum that had been put in the kitchen in the 1957 remodeling. We looked at the black and horrid floor beneath and decided it couldn't be saved (although I believe Caro suggested sanding it down). It is really gross -- it is strips of black paper (backing for the linoleum, I'd guess) and globs of glue, and cat hairs and food, all sticking in the floor. The "5 second" rule does not apply in the kitchen. In fact, I'd say it's the "5 centimeter" rule -- if something gets within 5 cm of the floor, it has to be thrown out. It looks grey here, but that's from dirt and dust over the black. We don't, to be honest, even sweep it often, because sweeping seems to create more dust and dirt.

At a sale in March, we purchased about 200 square feet of cork flooring. I am really looking forward to installing it (it's the clickable, floating flooring type).

Well, for some reason it took me 6 months to figure out we might as well try stripping the goo to see what there is to see beneath it. If nothing else, it will make for a cleaner floor in the meantime before we get to installing the cork. So I donned heavy gloves and knee pads, and started glopping Citrustrip, which is a relatively environmentally-friendly stripper.

It's a standard stripping process - glop on, cover with plastic wrap, wait for an hour, scrape off, clean surface with water. And it works like a dream. I have done 2/3 of the kitchen in 2 intense days of intense orange fumes and scrubbing on hands and knees. I think the worst part is the clean-up -- mopping with water. The mop is filthy after two or three passes across the stripped floor, and has to be rinsed out or it just moves the mud around. Every 4 square foot patch has to be mopped-rinsed-mopped 4-6 times (and probably more, but I get really bored with mopping).

I gotta say, the work has paid off beautifully. Under the horrible linoleum and the dirty goo, there is a pretty red fir floor. Probably this is old-growth fir (much of the original house is). The photo is slightly cheating, taken when the floor was wet after mopping. When it dries, it's a dull pale brown -- the wood is untreated.

If we decide to go with hardwood flooring, this will require sanding and polyurethane (not to mention, I have to finish stripping it). We'll find other places for the cork -- the basement, actually, would do well with a warm touch on the floor, or possibly the studio.

Measure Thrice, Cut Once -- and still cut wrong

My last post was about Tuesday night, and the decision about the lumber for the porch.

On Wednesday, Andrew Hung a Door (check my earlier post -- I can't figure out how to link to my own posts yet).

On Thursday we didn't get much done (ibid.).

On Friday night, in the mosquito-biting dark I mentioned before, we encountered our first major setback.

During the day, we had prepped for the porch floor installation -- pulling off the old wood (not as easy as we expected); removing gazillions of long rusty nails; adding Rotten Wood Repair Filler to the supporting aged 2x6s; leveling the floor of the crawl space (because without a porch floor we could stand, so it was a lot easier to rake than after the floor/roof is installed); laying a tarp over the space to discourage its continued use as Neighborhood Preferred Litter Box, etc.

(I made Andrew take a photo of me pulling nails to prove that I really do some of the work, not just take photos and comment upon his work.)

So, the next thing was to add another strut for the ends of the tongue-and-groove boards to attach to. (Mel is, in fact, screwing the bolts into that very support strut in the picture.) And then (if you recall) we were planning to replace the current 2x8 board -- the "threshold" -- that lays across the top of the steps with a 2x11, which would kiss the ends of the porch boards. In the photo, the current 2x8 (which is rounded and half-rotten) has the drills and box of screws resting on it.

Things went quickly downhill from there. The first thing we realized is that the newly added support was higher than the others, even though it was placed at the right height to meet the threshold at the top of the concrete steps.

The whole porch is built on a slightly-off-from-90-degree angle from the house, so that any water rolls away from the house towards the steps and the garden. The higher support would mean a) that water would roll back towards the house instead, and b) that the porch floor would be spongy -- you'd step on a cushion of air rather the solidity of being supported. That also means c) the porch floor boards would only be supported by two struts, about 7' apart (the two between my boot and Mel's back would not actually support or even touch the porch boards).

If we lowered the support strut, then the boards would be lower than the threshold, giving the water a perfect place to pool and start the rotting process over again. Damned if you do...

The second thing we realized was that we actually need 7'6" long boards, not 7'3" as we had measured. And had measured again. (We had measured repeatedly from a point in front of the door, which has a short extra sill -- a sill 3" deep, to be exact. You can sort of see the dark brown sill in the photo of me, above. We had reliability, but not validity, in our measurements.) The 2x11 option (of making a broader threshold at the top of the stairs) can't be extended to 2x14, at least, not without using two lengths of wood, which brings with it a seam down the middle and more chances of pooling water and fast rotting. The lumber we have is all 7' 0", if you recall.

This is all very hard to describe. The picture at left may illustrate adequately. I am standing on the steps to take the photo. The green at the bottom is the current "threshold", that oft-mentioned 2x8 laid flat at the top of the concrete steps. The line of wood just above that is our newly added strut (from which we've removed all but one bolt, so it's just resting there at the moment). The original struts cross the photo leading into the distance. You can see that the floorboard (coming down from the top) doesn't meet the strut. Damn it.



Solutions?

We have $250 of porch floor boards, and more importantly, a huge hole where the porch used to be, so we're not going back now. The current plan is to kill two problems with one, um, one laying of porch floor. We are going to pull the boards out all the way to the garden end of the top concrete step, so that water rolls all the way down and off onto concrete: nothing to rot. (Andrew will put a thin facing on the front of the step, so that you don't see raw ends of the porch boards.) Back at the "house-side" of the porch, all these boards will now end a full 12" from the outer wall of the house. There we will "patch", with a column of 12" long boards. With careful sawing, sanding, filler and paint, Andrew believes it won't show at all.

I have a bad feeling about putting all our ends on one plane (so to speak) and have raised the suggestion that we stagger the lengths of the boards across the whole space. This is what we feared that we would have to do on Tuesday, but now it seems little more work (to me) than the other plan, and it seems structurally more sound, too (although Andrew has convincing arguments for why it won't make a difference).

In any case, tomorrow we start by lifting the infamous "threshold" 2x8 plank and seeing what there is below it, which appears to be more wood, on top of concrete. We will do this before we commit to the other porch-boards-across-the-threshold plan. "No more surprises," Andrew said.

Huh? Ripping up the Porch Floor?

Sorry, my adoring readers, for not checking in for a couple of days. There has not been time for blogging: the deadline of Anne and the children's return has been a nervous litany in the backs of our minds. "12:30 p.m. Sunday. Gotta get done by 12:30 Sunday. It will all be too late on Sunday," muttered into our respirators in the misty overcast of morning, the unforgiving sun of midday, the dusty breezes of evening, and in the mosquito-ridden dark after sunset. (Yes, mosquitoes! In Portland! What hast thou wrought, O climate change?) We've been working hard. (And last night Ray came over for beers and grown-up games on the Wii, so there wasn't time for blogging then, either.)

Read this post as if it were written last Tuesday, when it would have been were I not out late at erudite book readings and fine dining (that is, a "demodern post-constructionist metafictional novel" and half a tuna sandwich and beer at McMenamins).

The under-porch storage project is independent of the porch-floor replacement, except that we're working in that part of the house anyway, and we need to put flooring/roof over the steps down into the new cellar. The porch floor has needed replacement since they purchased the house. Due to years of no maintenance and bad gutters (replaced a few years ago by Andrew), standing water near the steps had rotted out the wood. (Here's a little known fact: the porch was carpeted in Astroturf when they moved in.)

Not quite half the porch needs replacement, just the part at the head of the concrete steps. Simple enough to do -- pull off the old boards, slide in the new ones, prime, and paint. We figured it would take a day, maybe two when including unexpected surprises. Ha ha.

The first challenge was to find replacement lumber. The boards on the porch, presumably from 1915, but maybe from 1957 when the house was remodeled, are 3" tongue-and-groove boards long enough to extend from door to step without seams (about 7'). We needed about 40 new boards. Rejuvenation House sells them for $1.86 a linear foot -- or over $500. Ugh. Home Depot sells a cheaper version -- about 3-1/2" wide (which we could accommodate, though they wouldn't match the other, older part of the porch). However, the Home Depot lumber is about 1/4" - 1/2" thinner than the original lumber. The thinner board works with modern construction techniques, where the supporting struts are no more than 18" apart, but this older building has them about 24" or more apart. The Home Depot porch boards would sag pretty quickly, and be more liable to break.

Then, on Tuesday, we were at Woodcrafters, a specialty store for working with hardwood. If you ever want to get a Ph.D. in whittling, this is the store to visit. Anyway, they carry kiln-dried wood of the size we needed, for $1.60 a linear foot -- cheaper than Rejuvenation House but not "cheap". They had only a couple of boards in stock, so we'd have to order more (missing that Sunday deadline). Also, theirs came in 12' boards, giving us the option of wasting a lot (we only needed about 7' a board) or being forced to make a patchwork floor -- requiring a lot more work in cutting, placement and "wood filling" the seams.

We decided to look for other possibilities, such as plain 3" boards along which Andrew could rout out the tongue-and-groove. (Whether that is less work than building a patchwork porch floor remains to be determined, but it would at least have been cheaper). But as we walked through the high-ceilinged aisles of precut lengths of Rosewood, Poplar, Cherry and Cedar, of moldings in Oak, Maple, Walnut and Hemlock, of raw lengths of Exotic Woods (teak from Congo, catalpa, wood I've never heard of, like bubinga) ... suddenly the clouds parted and light shone down in haloed rays, as the demonstration table-saw sang across the store like a thousand shrill voices : we came upon an unmarked palette, there at the back of the store, of literally a porch-worth of our desired 3" tongue-and-groove fir.

It turns out, a client had ordered a special-cut load, and then backed out of the deal. The contractor wanted to get the wood off his hands asap, so it was selling for a mere $1 a linear foot, on a first-come, first-serve basis. It was 5:30 and they close at 6:00, so decisions had to be made.

Problem is, the special cut boards were 7' long, with a handful of 9' lengths. But our 7' was a rough estimate -- we had measured the space, but were expecting to have to cut it when we got home, so hadn't been exact about how much we needed where. We raced home and measured the porch again. How many boards did we really need? Would 7' work or were we back to square one? Would we pay $1 a linear foot in any case and just patch?

We measured -- we needed 7'3" lengths. Thirty-five of them. The clock was ticking -- I had to battle traffic to get to the suburb where Jasper Fforde was speaking, and Andrew wanted to get back and buy the wood, if it was usable, before the store closed. And, after all, Anne and the children were due back in only 4 days.

Okay, we reasoned, we'll just replace the header board (a 2x8, visible in the photos up top) with a 2x11, gaining those three inches in a deeper threshold at the top of the stairs. This would have the added benefit of placing that seam (between end of tongue-and-groove and side of header board) a couple of inches further away from rain splashing off the steps. It would require adding a 4x4 in the structural struts (to nail the ends of the boards to) but that would be a relatively trivial thing to add and we already had the extra wood (we checked). In Portland speak, "No worries. No worries".

I dashed off in one direction for my erudite evening, and Andrew in another direction to buy lumber. He bought 36 boards, (sold in packs of 6), including all of the 9' (one pack), just in case. And we were set to go on the porch.