After a few days off today we got down to finishing the kitchen floor.
The first step was to use an orbital sander to smooth out the whole floor and eliminate any places where one board was higher than the next. Usually people buy/rent/hire a drum sander for this job, but the kitchen is so small and the quarters are so confined in places that the orbital was just the trick. It took longer, about two hours, but in the end we had a floor as level and smooth as a professional could make it.
Then we put on the first of three coats of Bona Mega. To confine the fumes and future sanding dust we sealed off the kitchen from the rest of the house. Fortunately the way the house is designed we can still get to any room, as long as we're willing to walk outside to get to some.
A light sanding with 220-grit to smooth out the grain that the first coat raised, and we called it a night. Our goal is to do the other two coats tomorrow.
Maybe we learned some tricks or got lucky, but today's work went much quicker. Three things made the whole project much easier. We highly recommend them, even if #3 will be tough for most people to replicate.
- the power miter and table saws made quick, even, and straight cuts
- applying a touch of Vaseline to the nails eased their path through the hard oak
- the kindness of an old friend who gave us his virtually new nailer
After one hour we were about half-way done and definitely into the home stretch.
There weren't as many tricky cuts this time. Mostly we could line up the boards, measure the length, and cut. There was one cut with a slightly higher degree of difficulty, but nothing that our trusty jigsaw couldn't handle.
Here's what we accomplished today, with some shims to keep the last row in place.
And here's the final product.
Left to do are:
- sink the nail heads where we had to topnail
- fill the topnail holes, possibly with a combination of glue and oak sawdust to make a color match
- sand the whole floor and then put on a coating of Bona Mega
- repeat step 3 until we have four coats
In case you don't get the reference, it's to this classic Monty Python bit. Today was out fourth 11-hour day on this project. We're getting there and aim to be done tomorrow, hopefully without needing another 11 hours but something always manages to surprise us.
Naturally step one was to remove the rest of the maple.
Others may have been methods, but we used a tried and true one to get the boards up. First, insert wedge (in this case a chisel) to make some space between the board and the subfloor.
Then insert your leverage makers. Here a prybar and hammer do the trick. With appropriate leverage and steel the poor maple doesn't stand a chance.
If the nails didn't come up with the boards then we used a vice clamp wrench to pull them out.
What slowed our progress today was an abundance of tricky edges and angles because of our decision to work around the cabinets (and the maple left under them). To fill this odd space...
We had to notch the board and cut off parts of the under side to fit over the tongues.
And voila!
Then there was that 45-degree angle around the shelf we made. The old power miter saw came in mighty handy for these cuts.
So here's how we ended the day. The threshold is all set.
And we're in the home stretch now. Just straight cuts from here on out.
All of this work with hard woods (maple and oak) has caused a few casualties. This saw blade for the Bosch multitool looks like a hockey player.
And we learned the hard way that the chisel doesn't provide as much leverage as the prybar.
We did this work a few day ago but neglected to provide an update on the kitchen floor. Here we are in progress.
And here's what the floor looks like now. We'll get back at it tomorrow and hope to finish getting everything down. Then it will be time to clear coat.
After a well-deserved (if we do say so ourselves) breather this weekend we launched on one of the last big indoor demo projects--redoing the hardwood floor in the kitchen. Let's take a trip down memory lane to remember what we started with 19 months ago. Clearly, this wasn't going to cut it.
So we upgraded to prefinished, 3.25-inch maple flooring when we redid the studio's floor. Until Saturday this is what the kitchen looked like.
The transition was half white oak and half maple.
What we realized is that with the dining room flowing right into the kitchen it's jarring to go from the golden tones (what happens to white oak with a clear finish) to the white/pink of the maple. So we took up the maple. Those black marks on the cut parts of the maple (what we left under the cabinets) are the scorch marks left by the toekick saw when it was burning the sawdust or the finish. The deep gouges in the subfloor were from someone else, probably our first contractors.
The next step was to lay out the boards in the pattern we wanted. Our open basement served as the staging area. This is the main part of the kitchen in the same view as the picture above, with the cabinets and sink on the right and the stove on the left.
And here's the side area on the left as you enter the kitchen.
That's what we got through as of 10pm last night. And here's where we are after a full day of work today. The modest accomplishments were due to time spent: cutting out all of the maple in the transition to fit the new oak pieces, making sure we had a straight line from the doorway to the side door, practicing with the floor nailer, cutting pieces to fit, and more that escapes us at the moment. So far, though, we like what we see.
In other news, yesterday while the demo was in full swing we also made headway designing the countertop for the new sink in the garage.
We're done. The backsplash has grout. We put new caulk along the backsplash, tub, and from the floor to the tub. The mirror, bars, and shelves are back up. Here are a few views of the final result.
To refresh your memory, here's what it looked like before last week. With the light colored floor and grey backsplash it was somewhat cool.
Here's a closeup of the stone tile we took out.
If you're thinking "These people are nuts, they did all that work again!" then believe us that we've had those same thoughts. But we're determined to make this our ideal house even in the unfortunate event that it means we have to do something more than once to get it right.
Here was our first attempt at remodeling the room, made in haste more than a year ago--it was all white, yellow, and that light colored floor.
Why did we rush to make those early decisions that we are only now fully correcting? Too many reasons to recall here, but one big one was the sorry state of the room when we bought the house--lavender walls, grey toilet, cheap vanity and counter, who knows what kind of tile on the floor and walls, and enough grime for a small city.
