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If this is your first time visiting, welcome. If you are returning again, welcome back. While this blog was originally not going to be about me or my life, it seems to be morphing to include more of myself and experiences. I will still strive to add a different perspective to the news and events around the world that impact everyone's life,however, I will focus more attention on issues that relate more tangibly to our personal lives. We all live in a world that is increasingly interconnected yet it seems a lot of people are turning inwards, shying away from human interaction. Lets step away from ourselves and see what we can do to make a difference. There are ads on this page and 65 cents of every dollar earned will be donated towards helping the homeless. If you like what you are reading, please share it with your friends.




Thursday, February 21, 2013

Hard Stuff Past

Well, its the start of day 4 in the home project called "           ".  Yeah, there is no name for the project, I was just hoping I came up with one by the time I finished the last sentence, which obviously didn't happen.  Yesterday was a productive day and it saw the last of the hard, time consuming work being done.  First thing yesterday morning, I finished sheetrocking the ceiling and extra wall that I added near the top.  I then got to finishing the skim coat on the walls and taped all the joints of the sheetrock.  With all that done, the floor was my next major issue that needed to be dealt with.  The floor that ran through two out of three rooms upstairs is probably close to a hundred years old.  Normally, you would find a sub floor beneath whatever type of flooring you have down.  Well, in our house, the floor is the sub floor, no two layers like you see these days.  On top of that, what might have been a nice floor maybe 80 years ago, was deteriorated and covered with a super thin, brown, poo looking carpet.  Pulling up the carpet actually results in pulling up parts of the floor that it is glued to.  What I am trying to get at here is that it is one nasty ordeal to get it up and then get the floor up.  I originally figured when I started pulling the floor up that it would take me a couple of hours to get the floor up, reinforce anything that needed reinforcing, and put down the new sub floor to prepare for the bamboo floor that I want to continue from my son's room.  I think you know where I am going with this.  It took my much longer than a couple of hours to get it all done.  In my house, there is no such thing as just cutting away and hoping for the best.  You never can quite tell where floor joists are running and there are still sections of my house that have knob and tube wiring.  Any hasty movements could cause major issues.  So I took my time pulling up the floor to find a disaster.  I wouldn't even know where to begin describing what I found.  What it all boils down to is that it needed reinforcing.  There were parts of the floor joists that looked as if they were barely nailed together and some that actually moved when I went to see if they were loose.  On top of reinforcing what was already there, I needed to shim the entire floor in order to bring it up to the level of the finished floor in my son's room.  That way, when I continue the floor into the hallway, there won't be any major sags or dips or bumps.  At least that's my hope. 

I got everything reinforced, shimmed, and the new sub floor cut just before I headed out to dinner at my parents house.  I was going to try putting the sub floor down before dinner, but when I brought the plywood up the stairs, I noticed that I forgot to notch out one section that it would fit nice and snugly.  So I left it at the top of the stairs and figured I would do it after dinner.  When I got home, I decided I needed a little reprieve from all the work and started a fire in our pit in the backyard.  A friend came over for about an hour, and then I decided to get back to work.  What time was it at that point?  10:00.  So at that time, with my friend gone and a few beers down, I figured it would be the perfect time to try and fit the sub floor down.  Much to my surprise, it only took about an hour and a half between all the trimming and what not to get it just right.  I know it seems like a long time, but when you are working by yourself in an already cramped hallway with a big piece of plywood, everything takes time.  So that was my last task last night and as soon as I finish writing this, I will be doing a little clean up in the hallway/stairwell before skim coating.  Things are moving along.  Now its time to get cranking.  At least with skim coating I know I can fly through and still make it look good in the end.  Here is to another long day followed by a dart match tonight at 8.  Super tired, but that's why coffee was invented, right?

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