House Remodel Update #2

As I mentioned in the last post, last Saturday we pulled up the floor in the entryway. 

In addition, the old entryway wall came down.   You can see from this pic that we had to do that before we pulled up that last layer of diagonal sub floor. 

Notice that gap in the floor - that's the current opening/stairs down to the basement.   That will soon be the new hallway.  Which means it has to have a floor. 

Notice the wall in the pic [the one behind the plastic sheeting].  That left side of the wall will be the new doorway into the office, [which right now is our temporary living room.]  We'll be cutting that door in later this week.  You know, after there's a floor there. 

Also notice the ends of the joists sticking out on the left.   That's new floor and new joists will be joined to those, coming over the old floor joists in the entryway [which will be taken out from the bottom].    Confused?   Me, too.  Eric has to explain every step a couple of times, but it is all super structurally sound and working brilliantly. 

What you're seeing here is the entryway with most of the new joists in.  

That's the living room wall at the back with the plastic sheeting in front of it.  

That's the stairs going up on the right.   

The long joist running up next to the stairs is a beam that the basement stairs will connect to.  

The rest of those joists are tied into the joists that you saw sticking out of the floor in the previous pic.   The new floor will go on those.  

In this pic, Eric is in what will be our new bedroom, where we have the saw [and a pile of stuff that needs to go to the dump.]  The joists that you see go over the old basement stairs, joining the bedroom area, the living room area and the new entryway floor.  This means that in a couple of days, everything will have new joists and subfloor and this entire area will be new construction with new level floors, all joined together. 

Next up: 

• what to do with the front door
• new subfloor
• new hallway walls
• new stairs up
• new stairs down
• under stairs storage
• deciding what to use for flooring in that end of the house

I'll keep you posted. 

Oak Floors

So, there's been an extended period of radio silence here.  Sorry about that.   We've been busy doing the upstairs floors.

The guest room floor is installed.  We used more of the salvaged maple that we used for the other bedrooms upstairs.

The common room is almost done.  We used salvaged oak - from the same house the maple came from.

On the back of the oak we found this stamp:

Henry Buchholz Hinsdale ILL

We did a bit of research and found that Hinsdale is up near Chicago.   Henry Buchholz was a builder and developer in the early 1900s.  He liked oak.   So do we.

The oak floor is going much faster than the maple.   We can't tell if that's just because we really know what we're doing or because it's drier this time of year and we're not fighting swollen wood or what.   At any rate, we're grateful.

This is what's left of the oak today.   Our boards ranged in length from 12 inches to 15 feet long.  One of the things we have to do to make the best use of the wood is to put it together like puzzle pieces so that we don't make cuts and can fit the existing pieces together.   So, we arrange the wood by length.   It's tedious, but worth it when it comes time to lay out the rows for installation.   Layout is my job.   Installation [running the Super Nailer] is Eric's.

Layout involves fitting the boards to the correct length and attempting to get 100 years of mystery gunk off the tongues so the boards fit together well.  Sometimes I can get it off.  Sometimes it's cement.  If it doesn't then Eric goes at it again with the box knife [pic below] before final placement and nailing.

Turns out we had enough oak to do most of the floor upstairs and in front of the stairs. Woo-hoo!  We have enough maple left over to do the rest of the big room upstairs.   We considered getting new oak and keeping it all the same, but neither of us really wants to use the rest of the maple anywhere else in the house and we don't want to toss it, so we decided that we'd have a 'mixed' floor and let that be part of the house's story.  

We probably could have done something fancy to show off both woods up there, but we didn't know exactly how much square footage we had to begin with or how much maple we'd have left over after the guestroom without doing a way more intensive count than anyone wanted to do, so we winged it.    When we started with the oak, we looked at the stack and said, 'If we can get from the bookshelves all the way over to the stairwell with oak, then we can do the other area in maple and at least the oak and maple areas will make sense.'   We'll have exactly enough oak.  The floor upstairs won't match, but it's a good story.