Preparation From The Ground Up

After work on Friday, all the conditions were right to finally start our flooring project. After all, with our first daughter on the way this was only the first project and we needed to get moving.  I ended up leaving work a little early and spent my lunch hour at sears getting the remainder of the tools that I needed for our project.  The flooring was already acclimatizing in the office area for 72 hours.  All I needed now was a handy carpet ripper and a little reckless abandon. I just slit the carpet and padding into three sections and rolled it up and out to the curb it went. Once that  was out I used a pry bar and a mallet to pull all the carpet tack strips and anything else that construction left in the concrete.  By that time it was about 8pm and after moving all the furniture out and pulling all the other materials out it was time to call it a night.

In the morning, all that was left was the baseboards.  Since we were planning on refinishing these I had to be a little more careful pulling these out.  But with a razor knife and the aforementioned pry bar, they were really no trouble at all.  I used a hand scraper to make sure everything was relatively level and ready for underlayment.  Since the planks we bought had padding already attached to the back (a nice time-saving feature) all we had to do was install the moisture barrier and start laying planks. The planks came pre-cut into three lengths, so that made our job much easier.  The only boards I had to cut were the last pieces at the end of each row.

We quickly found out that Laura was better at installing and I was destined to be the miter saw operator.  Once we established a rhythm, things started going quick.

After only an hour of installing we were about 40% complete.  I should mention that these are click-lock flooring and since we are in Florida and on a concrete slab, we are floating the floor (no glue, no nails, no mess).  We really started laying planks at around 1pm, and by 4:30 with a hour lunch break in there were to the other wall and starting in on last couple rows with all the fun miter cuts.  No more straight edges for me.  Everything was chop the end to match the previous plank lengths, add a 45 degree angle and then every once in while hand cut a little triangle middle to accommodate for doorways and such.  By despite all that we were laying the last plank at around 5:00pm.


After a short retrospective we decided to power through and just finish everything we could that night so we could relax on Sunday.  So we pulled the re-finished baseboards out of the garage and starting installing them with the little 3 gallon air compressor and air nailer I just got.  I'll never go back to hammer and nails.  I think we had all the baseboards installed in less than ten minutes with only tiny nail holes to paint over.  We didn't have any quarter round before because there was carpet in the room, so technically we still have to do that to be finished but that should only take a half hour or so.  We moved most of the furniture back into the room and were recouping on the couch by 8pm. Below are the results!  I'll take better pictures when we finally get setup in here again. But I have been getting before and after requests, so here they are!

Before

After

Thanks for Reading!
~Nathan (and Laura)

It's a girl!!!

Hello all,

16 weeks!

This will be our first official post where we are committed to the blog.  Before this we played around with the idea of keeping this up as a communication tool but didn't know if we would commit. Well, we are now committed after talking to family members and their requests for this.

As most of you already know (and by the post title) we found out on February 7th at 1:00pm that our healthy kiddo is a baby girl!  We are just very happy that all the labs and tests that the little bean goes through come out with perfect results.  She is establishing high marks already.  I have to attribute this to two things: great, fantastic, amazing genes from both sides of the family and pre-natal vitamins!  We both have alarms on our phones so we remember to have Laura take her vitamins at 6:30pm every night, give or take an hour.

We are both planners.  Laura with her tasks and lists excels at planning and me with project management as a key facet of my career, there is no end to the prep work we are planning with Kiddo #1.  We are going to pull up 1000 sq ft of carpet and replace it with baby/kiddo/dog-resistant wood flooring.  The planks are already sitting in the garage, it just needs to be installed.  We are accepting applications immediately.  Note: Be able to work long hours with some (absolutely no) pay.  We look forward to seeing resumes.  Please include a cover letter and at least three references, pictures of previous flooring jobs preferred.

In prepping and designing the nursery, we had to clear out that room of pretty much everything. Since this used to be about half storage, that translated to needed more storage.  Which of course means that I needed to start laying some flooring in the attic.  But to get up there more easily means I needed to install an attic ladder. And so on and so forth. Project and project and project....

Right now we have a blank slate in the soon to be nursery, a garage full of beautiful golden teak flooring, beautiful lady pregnant with our baby girl and two dogs we are training to be miniature horses (saddles not included).

In other news, we have had requests for pictures of the completed Koi pond.  Although it was complete in October or thereabouts some folks have not seen the final product.  We still need to plant in the section to the left, and I think I will be forever retrieving the side rocks out of the pond where the dogs push them in to get a drink of water. Oh well, the fish are thriving as well as all the other life at the Johnson place.  We will keep you all comprised.

~Nate (and Laura)