Eternal Revengeance of the Floor-Lords

[roadrunnertwice]

OK, so we've been installing prefinished hardwood floors in the upstairs of our house (which we've been tentatively calling the Corner House to distinguish it from our former place). We managed to get our bedroom and our housemate's room finished before moving in, but missed the stairs, the landing, and the office. The stairs can wait indefinitely (and require a new skill set), and I just finished the landing this weekend, so that leaves the office.

Here's how you lay floor. First, you figure out what direction everything's going and how many different "zones" there are, which I don't even want to get into right now, and then you can tackle each zone (room, basically) separately. For each zone, you measure the length of the room (the width doesn't matter) at every point where the length might be different, and do some nail-biting arithmetic to make sure you won't use any illegal (sub 1") board widths at either end of the room, WHICH I DON'T EVEN WANT TO GET INTO RIGHT NOW. Then you use a frikken laser to draw your start line and nail down the first row by hand, then you nail down all the other rows, making sure you lay out five or so rows ahead so you don't paint yourself into a corner and use an illegal series of board transitions. (Which is yet another thing I'm not getting into today.)

The problem is, to do the main part of the floor you need a lot of boards plus a way to cut them for the ends of rows. What we've been doing is laying out a shitload of wood in the far half of the room, and then running the chop saw in an adjacent unfinished room because it makes a ton of sawdust that we don't want in our work area or living space. But now we're out of adjacent unfinished rooms! 😩

This is sort of the penultimate stage of the sliding-blocks puzzle we've been living in. What we think we're going to do is just run the chop saw in the far half of the room for as long as we can, trying to keep the sawdust mostly in the closet, and then we're going to have to move it somewhere else. But the garage is full! And it's rainy outside! So Ruth had the brilliant idea to run it in the downstairs bathroom, because it's a perfectly square space with almost no squirrelly little fixtures, and the only furniture is a bookshelf or two. We'll still have to carry a bunch of boards up and down the stairs, but at least this looks feasible. So, I guess we'll let you know how that goes.

We haven't been taking as many pictures of the actual flooring process as I'd like, because there's just not a lot of room in the flow of work for that shit. Oh well! I'll try and at least get a short video of Ruth running the pneumatic nailer or deploying Whack Friend.