The flooring guys (Nick and Milton) put in the final bits of plywood, covering over the joists that Bob strengthened yesterday. After that, they sealed up a lot of the seams between the plywood they had put down.
Next up: Nick says he’s going to seal up all the edges and seams between boards, in prepartion for the self-leveling underlayment. I recall him saying something like how we needed to seal up the floor “like a siwmming pool,” because if the self-leveling liquid finds a gap… it’s just going to pour right down into the basement like water.
Liz said she felt a bit depressed because “the goalposts moved,” but she powered through things as always. With the flooring guys and Bob working during the day (and us working remote during the day), we end up having to do what we can in the evenings.
We’re lucky to have Milton and Nick (L to R) working on our floors. Bob’s worked with them before on a few jobs, and the come highly recommended. Bob’s got an incredibly high bar for the quality of work he expects of those in the trade… so when he’s enthusiastic about someone, we know to pay attention.
We had a lot of debris to take out, but our first floor is officially cleared and prepped for the flooring guys tomorrow. It’s a crazy feeling, to see how different the floors look, and to imagine people coming in to take over the remainder of the work.
So I guess I should start off this post with this detail: it’s our anniversary today!
But the house demands its house work time, and so we were both working to do our part during the day. We’ve got flooring guys coming on Monday, and had more prep work to finish before their arrival.
To clear the way for the flooring guys, we needed to remove the lower stairs and put in something temporary. While Bob was building those temp stairs out for us, we had a night that involved this placeholder, until the temp stairs were ready.
Bob was over tonight, clearing out a few layers of the brick underneath the old closet. This is effectively the top of the empty chimney stack, which we have access to via the basement.
Tonight we pulled up the floor where the old closet used to be.
With the work we did pulling up the floor in the main hall, we had to do something with all that debris. Hence my day today: cutting up the super long boards, and packing as much as I could into a Bagster.
Big house day today, as we were looking to get the floor pulled up in the main hall. Here, Liz is tackling some ceiling demo prior to hitting up the floor.
A lot of work tonight, both upstairs and downstairs.
Mostly short bursts of house work in the evenings, after long days of work. I’m on call this week, and the days have felt pretty busy and full. They tend to leak past 5PM, and so I’ve only been able to get a small sliver of time to work on house stuff. But every little bit helps, as we’ve got a lot to get done this upcoming holiday weekend.
There wasn’t a ton of flooring left to remove, but there was a ton of cleanup to do today: cutting up all the boards, removing all the splinters, pulling out all the remaining nails, and shop-vacing the whole room.
Similar to what we did in the dining room, this weekend my goal was to remove the thin top layer, and the secondary layer below. Underneath both of those is the substrate… but we’re leaving that for the flooring guys to remove.