Welcome again to Saturday Morning Home Repair blog, where we talk about fixing houses and the things in them that are supposed to work but may not always work as expected. An ad hoc cadre of building professionals and enthusiastic amateurs attempt to answer questions that arise from readers, and offer encouragement and advice for those inclined to do things for themselves, if they can. We all do a lot of things, collectively, and can probably help out with insights from our vast experience.
And sometimes, we just gab.
Good morning! When we left, our heroes were on the brink of success, after having been foiled many times by their enemies and betrayed once again by Dr. Megladon, but they persevered until at last, the end was in sight....
Oops, wrong saga. Sorry.
Right. Let's see, last installment was about the kitchen cabinets, chronicled here. This week, the floor--it is done. Ta da!
Grab some coffee and settle in for the misadventures.
Long ago, someone had a hammer. And a sack of nails. Whoever that long-forgotten twerp was, I'd like to dig him up and slap him around.
He left nails everywhere. My serial nailer was particularly fond of large-headed tacks. I found rows of them in the muntin of a lightwell, serving no purpose but to rust. I've found them strategically lined up, and in other places, grouped in no particular order.
I took up a lot of the stray nails when we removed the subfloor in the kitchen, back in 1997, but couldn't get all of them, couldn't even begin to find all of them. For one thing, they'd been painted over, and for another, the floor had been through a couple of floods, and they rusted. But I knew the little suckers were still around--I snagged my socks on them often enough.
So the plan was that, as soon as the cabinets were done, I'd get down on the floor with my toolkit of nail-extraction devices and go board by board. Then we had a couple of places that needed patching--a three-board wide hole that had been clumsily covered up, a board under the south window that had rotted all along its length, probably due to its proximity to a leaky hot water radiator system, and holes--from the aforesaid radiators, from pipes, wires, and other contrivances since lost to history. The original floor was a bit of a mess.
Unfortunately, so was the humble nail-puller. Earlier this year I'd found a small spot on my calf, about a quarter of the size of a pencil eraser, that proved to be melanoma and earned me a four-inch incision that was maddeningly slow to heal. Finally, though, my surgeon removed all the stitches and took me off the injured reserve list. I was cleared, as he said, to do anything.
Apparently "anything" didn't include kneeling on the floor. I'd been down long enough to pull about three nails when I felt a little zing in my leg, and then another, looked down and saw a dark stain on my jeans. Popped the incision in two places. There was nothing to do but bind the leg up again and wait.
A week went by, and then a couple more, and finally I was healed up enough to go toe-to-toe with my nemesis, the ghostly nailer whose memory I cursed. A bright light, my array of tools that run from miniature cats-paws to superbars, hammers, and a couple of handy nail-sets for the ones that just wouldn't come up, and within a few days I was satisfied that I'd found all the nails that were findable. (And, man, was I wrong!)
Anyway, we'd made the decision to preserve as much of the original floor as we could. The worst damage had been to the boards around the fireplace. Below you see a photo of the fireplace under reconstruction--look at the boards butting the brick hearth. The picture doesn't do justice to the degree of deterioration, but it'll give you an idea of how much the boards cupped. (All pictures in lightbox, so you can see our amateur skills in all their glory.)
The floorboards were a problem long under consideration.
In fact, they were so bad we decided to cut them off about four inches from the hearth and insert a board cross-ways, framing the hearth. Andy scabbed 2 x 4's onto the joist to hold the new frame as well as provide support for the new board ends. The plywood patch had to come out and we put yellow pine replacement boards down, instead. Not a terribly elegant solution, but the butted ends will be covered by the under-table rug.
Measure twice and cut once. Then measure again and cut again. Repeat as needed.
The floors had been painted a long time ago (long before 1960, before 1930, before...I don't want to think about it), the top layer is brown and was underlain with black and both coats wore like iron--literally. Fifteen years of foot traffic wore a lot of the paint off the edges, but in the bottoms of the cupped boards the paint remained as pristine as when it was first laid down. Andy supposed it was made with a tar composed of whale oil, and he was only half-kidding.
Once we got the patches in place, which involved cutting the boards abutting the hole in the picture above back to the next joist and laying in the new ones, and replacing the rotted floorboard and treating the weakened parts with wood hardener, after shimming up the dropped board edges until they were something resembling level, after plugging the drilled holes, some with dowel rods, some with an old broom handle whittled down, hammered into place and cut flush, it was time to clear the furniture out and bring in the sanders.
Almost 24 hours straight of sanding an 18' x 20' room.
We didn't want to destroy the wear patterns, or the cupping, and we still had an array of broken tongues to deal with. And that paint was demonic in its endurance, but hours of sanding slowly paid off. The big stander thinned the paint and eventually bare wood began to appear.
Jack and I took turns with the belt sanders, to de-paint the cupped boards.
The big sander and the belt sander couldn't reach the edges along the mop boards, so I had to soften up the paint with a heat gun and scrape as much as I could, and then hit it with a palm sander.
Yes, the mop boards haven't been sanded yet. But they will before snow flies.
After the belt sander got the worst of the stuff up, the palm sanders went in.
Many hours of sanding.
Eventually something that looked like the original floor emerged.
Those dots are not "spirit orbs" or ghosts--it's just dust. Lots of dust.
When we were done, the floor was cleaner than it had been in 150 years.
Then it was time for the sanding sealer.
The dogs did not appreciate being evicted for a few days.
Sanding sealer and then floor finish--two coats, and now all we have to do is wait for it to cure.
The view's not bad from this angle.
Nor from this angle, either.
So that's where we are. I still have the windows and woodwork on one wall to sand and finish, and the walls have to be patched, skim coated and painted, but for now, I'm pretty happy.
And the nails--yeah, there are still dozens of them, all shined up by the sander. I went over them with a brown sharpie to dull them before the sanding sealer went down. And I'd still like to find that twerp, because I have four more rooms to finish after the kitchen is done.