Installing a wood floor

Before we moved into this house two and a half years ago, we pulled out the super-stinky, stained, sad, scary carpet that was in the big front room/dining area.  I scrubbed the concrete pad with bleach three times before we moved in to get rid of the odor.  And then, with so many other areas of the house needing more immediate attention, we left our furniture, covered with blankets, on the concrete pad for over two years. 

We had just lived the previous 8 years in a 2 bedroom (about 1500ft2 I think?) house, and had lived in smaller places than that before.  So what if three or four hundred square feet of this house weren't available?  We still had more space than we had ever had.  (However, I'm finding that there is never so much floor space that it can't be covered with all the socks and shoes we have in the house - they have replaced legos as the most common floor covering.)


Seriously, this is only some of the shoes that are left around the house.  How can only two boys wear so many shoes in a week.  To be fair, only one pair belongs to Nathaniel...

After I finished grading my fall semester finals, Chris and I started putting in the floor.  We bought the wood (engineered hickory) two years earlier and it sat in our entry "curing" until now.  It was good and ready.  First, we cleaned up the floor (the bare concrete has been a dust-generator for the past two years) and then primed and leveled it.  "Self leveling compound" is a misnomer unless it means that you have to do the leveling your "self".  Chris leveled the floor a week ago Saturday, and then after doing some grinding decided it needed more leveling.  So, Monday (after submitting my final grades) I went back to Home Depot and bought two more bags of leveling compound and a bottle of primer.  I primed the floor (just one side that seemed to be sloping) and gave it a couple of hours to dry so Chris could do the leveling after work.

Primer drying on concrete

 

Self-leveling compound (second round)

 

Grinding concrete

Tuesday morning the floor was level, dry, and after some grinding to get rid of some ripples, we measured, snapped lines, and Chris glued down some guide-boards for the first few rows.  The biggest challenge of putting engineered wood on concrete slab is the glue.  This was a tongue-in-groove floor, not a snap-in, so there was no "floating" a floor and we couldn't nail it to the concrete.  The glue was thick and would get everywhere.  Fortunately for us, someone at the college department party the weekend before had just finished gluing a floor in his house and had an extra jug of adhesive cleaning solvent in the trunk of his car.  We had bought mineral spirits and he had learned the hard way that mineral spirits did not work very well.  We each kept a solvent soaked rag hanging from our back pockets to wipe our fingers, tools, drips, or any glue that squeezed up through the boards and it went very smoothly.  I think he saved us a lot of trouble.  Chris said it was the best purchase he'd ever made out of the trunk of a car.

Trowelling out the glue

The first few rows were slow.  Chris did all the trowelling and floor laying and I handed him boards and tools.  We had to cut boards to fit the fireplace.  So, after the first full day of laying boards, we only had 6 rows down.  We worked each night when Chris got home from work and would lay some rows and then sit in the spa.  Our backs were so sore and our fingers were getting raw.  Eventually, I started trowelling some of the glue and laying the boards and we could go much faster.

Woohoo!  DIY Jen.

We finished laying boards on Saturday night.  Chris cut the trim to size, but with Christmas three days away, we've taken a break (so I could clean up the dust that covered the whole house, and make candy, bake and generally get ready for the holidays.)  We need to do a final cleaning of the floor to get rid of any glue spots, patch the wall around the base boards, do some painting, cut, stain, and install new base boards.  I think we will move the furniture in before all the base boards are done though, I'm tired of having the piano in the kitchen.

Piano in the kitchen?!



All done!  Yay!

Doesn't it look pretty?  I'm very excited. 

 

The Front Yard is Finally Done

We have finally finished redoing the front yard.  Its very exciting.  Our house is very visible in the neighborhood and we have lots of people watching us as they drive by, making comments as they walk their dogs, and even stopping in their cars to tell us about how much work they have done on their yards.  Luckily, we have nice neighbors (and patient too) and all of the comments have been positive (well, often full of advice, but still positive).  There was one older lady who askedy why we didn't leave the yard like it was, she liked it that way.  Can't please them all.

So, here is a pictoral history of the last year and a half  in our front yard.  I've included a picture of the final product at the beginning for those of you who don't want to slog through the whole process.

See, it turned out nice.  The plants are still pretty tiny, but they'll grow quickly with our nearly-year-round sunshine.

OK, this is what it looked like when we first looked at the house.  It looked great.  But after we signed the contract the owner stopped watering and the tenting for termites (required for home sales in CA) killed back most of the plants near the house.  And we discovered that the hedges and lawn were composed of at least 5 different kinds of plants/grass each.  So, it only looked good from a distance.  

This tree is an ornamental pear.  It had never been trimmed properly and the branches hung low over the driveway.  The roots were breaking up the sidewalk and heading toward the foundation of the house.  But it was pretty.

 So, we stopped watering (we had a $300 water bill because the cable install people had crushed a sprinkler pipe under the driveway when they installed a conduit and we decided we didn't want to spend any more money on plants we wanted to take out anyway.)  The scouts spent two Saturday mornings at our house tearing out hedges.  It was hard work.  And, we poisoned the grass.

 Then the digging started.  Chris excavated the sprinkler system which was way more work than we expected.  It was laid out crazy and the pipes were old and brittle and broke easily, and there are so many rocks in the soil that the digging had to be done by pickax.  That meant either Chris had to do all the digging, or spend a lot of time patching pipe that broke when I did the digging.

So much work.  Thanks Chris.

People would say to us, "You know you can hire people to do this?"  Really?

I dug out the Agapanthus (Lily of the Nile) that completely obscured a lovely landscaping rock.

We did get some help from the boys, but only one at a time.  Chris' grandpa used to say, "One boy is worth half a man.  Two boys are worth no man at all."  Or something like that.

Map of the yard for planning how much seed, mulch, and such was needed.

 After the sprinklers were done it was time to get the ground ready to plant grass.  We had gone back and forth on whether or not to take the eucalyptus tree out.  It was huge.  We had decided that we were going to keep it and just get it trimmed so it didn't blow over on the house.  It shaded the house in the afternoon keeping it cooler.

Rototilling (he rototilled twice to get the slope right.)

This drove me crazy.  The sod that was laid in the 70's used a plastic mesh that we had to keep pulling off the rototill blades.  This bundle was only a small part of what we pulled out.

 Of course, we had a storm come through the day after Chris rototilled that blew down hundreds of trees around town.  So, we needed a new plan for the front corner of the yard.

I like the way the water looks in the rototilled furrows.

One advantage of having high priests help instead of elders is that you are more likely to have access to someone with some good tools.

We had the stump ground up by a tree removal company.  All of the rest of the tree was collected by a neighbor for firewood, some that was left in the street was removed by the city, and we split the big slices of trunk for our own firewood.

 Then we seeded the lawn.

 Since I had the attention of the city (our eucalyptus tree blocked the street for a week) I had them take out the ornamental pear (because it was a city tree) and it was breaking up the sidewalk.

 Biggest problem with the corner now was that it was full of giant roots left by the tree and it was a steep slope down to the sidewalk.

 A lot of work went into moving dirt off the slope to make it more shallow and hacking out roots.

Nathaniel dug out a lot of dirt.  Davis moved it to the backyard in the garden cart.

The city planted a new tree - another ornamental pear.

Nathaniel and Davis take turns mowing the lawn and trimming the edges now.

 The next big project was to install exterior lighting.  That meant digging more trenches and patching more sprinkler pipe.

 We had quite a few large landscaping rocks scattered around the front and back yards that didn't look good where they were.  We used them to stabilize the hill on the corner.  The problem was moving them.  We had to use a winch to pull them onto a dolly or onto boards and drag them across the yard.

Two of the four largest  rocks in place and a giant root that we ended up burning out to get rid of. 

 Finally in December we were ready to put in landscaping plants.  We laid down a weed barrier covered with bark chips because we have put so much work into this yard already, and there is still the back yard to do, that I just don't think I'd have the energy to start pulling weeds after the winter rains.

 We planted different varieties of Agapantha, creeping lily, day lily, and iris under the ornamental pear tree.

The walk is bordered by Huechera (Coral Bells)

This is a sweet (or fragrant) olive.  These tiny white blossoms smell so good.  I put it by the front door so the fragrance will waft in on the afternoon ocean breeze.

White and pink tea trees.  A grizzled old man came up to me at the nursery when I was buying these and told me that the barbary pirates used to boil these leaves for tea.  Hmmm...

Against the wall to the back yard.

The reddish bark makes the rocks stand out better.

Some little succulents that look like rocks.

I wasn't feeling well, so I helped mostly by watching.

Our new little plants even survived some frost.