Skip to main content

More on the floor

 Sunday

I had one day to get more stuff taken care of before Doug returned. Siggy decided to come along, which was great!

He installed half the oak floor in the master bedroom, including cutting and nailing.




He found this beautiful dragonfly that had gotten trapped in the house.


He installed a couple outlet covers.



We glued in a couple hundred plugs and cut them off flush with the floor.


As with the subfloor two weeks ago, we discovered that we'd used a terrible batch of screws, many of which had already broken; others broke when we tried to sink them a little deeper. Aaargh. Jon pulled a couple hundred screws out and had to drill a few new holes to make up for screws that were sheared off and stuck in place. Next time, huuuuge screws.

Monday

Siggy and Jon nearly finished off the master bedroom floor, leaving the tricky last few rows for Doug.



We fixed a few hundred more screws and installed a few hundred more plugs. Then we cut and installed some splines to fill a big gap in the balcony floor. The upstairs is ready to sand.


Meanwhile Doug was puttying and sanding the first floor.



Having finished preparing the fir floor, Siggy and Jon went to work furring out the stairs for the oak treads and risers. Jon had originally designed the stairs for 1-1/2" car decking steps to match the balcony, but decided later that the fir wouldn't be durable enough for stairs.



 
Tuesday
 
Siggy and I had half a day before Doug was going to begin applying finish, which meant kicking us out of his job site. We spent it installing the rest of the stair tread spacers.
 
The landing also had a "temporary" 3/4" subfloor waiting to be replaced with 1-1/2" car decking. Since we switched to the oak floor, we needed to make the subfloor permanent. We pulled it off, sistered up the joists in the box below, and reinstalled the plywood panels with lots of glue and screws.



That took us to about noon, after which we freshened up the gas in the generator and lawn mower to get them started again, and headed home.

Doug finished up around five, and sent these photos of the first layer of finish applied to the downstairs oak.



Wow. It looks amazing.

Comments

  1. JSeptember 5, 2022 at 9:49 PM

    You guys are killing it. Amazing contributions from Siggy. Sure can't wait to see it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JSeptember 6, 2022 at 7:37 PM

    Youzers! Exciting week!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It is DONE!

The final inspection was today. This guy is Levi, the county inspector, and as you can see, we passed! He only had two questions for me. One was about the energy efficiency credits and the blower door test, for which I had the compensating paperwork for the low-flow faucets already prepared. The second was asking for a smoke detector outside the bedroom; I pointed up and he saw that we already had one tucked into the alcove. And that was that! I got up at 5am to be certain I'd be here before the inspector, and I was ... by about five hours. In that time, I took another truckload of tool buckets down to the storage container, then picked up all the floor protection in the great room and vacuumed and mopped. It's glowing! Then I went back down to the storage container to get a hammer so I could glue in 32 wood plugs to cover the screws for the french doors. I fought with installing the screens, but the frames are too big! The manufacturer said "yeah we don't even make th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Odds and ends

I made progress on a bunch of little things today.  I painted a fencepost in 12" segments and pounded it in at the property line, where the outdoor camera can see it. Now we can measure the snow accumulation. I worked on finishing up almost-complete receptacle branch circuits. The first one I worked on was a little mystery: all the receptacles were installed, but the power didn't reach past a certain point in the line. After some investigation with a wire tracer and watching through the videos we took before covering the walls, I worked out what had happened: two receptacles shared a stud bay, facing into opposite rooms. The plan had been to bring power up to one box, jump over to the other box, and continue back down to the crawlspace to the next box. We forgot the jumper. I couldn't fish a wire between the boxes myself, so that repair waits. Upstairs, installing two receptacles completed the branch. The bathroom vent hole in the tile backer board was a skosh too small. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Energy efficiency testing

I came up after work to meet Brian, the contractor who is doing our blower door test: In this test, a big fan pumps air out of the house at a prescribed pressure differential, and then the air flow rate is measured in cubic feet per minute, then converted to whole house air changes per hour. The maximum limit is 5.0, and we scored that. Hooray! Brian said that we'd done a pretty solid job sealing the house, especially for an owner-built house; getting extremely tight seals requires careful awareness of the sealing challenges at every stage of construction. Another thing I learned by building a house. While I was up there, I got most of the way through installing a heat pump water heater to comply with energy efficiency requirements I re-discovered when looking up the blower door test requirements. This is all a bit silly. For our application -- a house occupied infrequently -- the on-demand heater is the best efficiency tradeoff, because it has zero standby waste. Unfortunately, th...
Post a Comment
Read more