Hardwood Floor Install - Oops

I finished installing hardwood floor in Joshua's bedroom last night. I'm about halfway done the 1800 sq ft install (2nd bedroom + hallway are left). It's gone really well and I am very pleased how it is turning out.

The flooring is 3.25" prefinished Bruce, stained cherry. Not the best quality but a good price and it looks nice once installed.

I've been laying down 15# felt atop the plywood subfloor, usually one 3 ft row of felt at a time, tacking it in place then laying the hardwood before laying the next row of felt out.

Once the floor was complete I realized that there should be one of these :

Somewhere here :

Oops.

Hardwood Patching / Refinishing

Over the weekend, I finished up the last time sensitive project that I had to complete. The original hardwood floors downstairs needed to be refinished, but before we could do that there was some patching to do.

The wall moving and a suspected dog stain meant two high traffic areas needed to be patched. There was also a hole in the closet, likely from the original floor plan being modified that needed a few boards to patch as well.

The first step was removing all the cut pieces around the area where the wall was in the now hallway. I used a circular saw to cut the pieces where they disappeared under the tiled bathroom floor and then a pry bar and hammer to pull them out as intact as possible.

Many of the pieces were unusable due to excessive nail or screw holes from the carpet or the closet hardware. Salvageable pieces I pulled the nails out and cut the ends square so they could be reused.

I ended up needing 20 more square feet to patch the blank areas. I could only find one local hardwood dealer that carried unfinished red oak flooring which naturally cost more than the prefinished Bruce oak that we are installing in the rest of the house. Having now installed both the prefinished and unfinished I can see the quality is much higher in the unfinished. The lack of the v-groove is also very nice. Since the floor has not been finished yet I don't know for sure, but it seemed to me that the unfinished floor will turn out much nicer than the pre-finished.

The dog stain area was a PITA to patch as it was in the middle of the floor. More than one flooring person who came to quote our job told us that it would have to be patched, that it was likely the stain was deep in the wood. I thought about sanding it down a bit and checking before patching but never got around to it. When I cut the old boards out I could immediately see that they did not need to be ripped out. By then it was too late and they were in pieces. The dog stain had not penetrated at all into the wood. Nuts.

Before and after pictures of the hallway. The after is only sanded, with no finish yet. I am amazed at how well the old and new wood blends.

My Electrical Nightmare

The wiring in this house seems to have been done by a drunken monkey. Most of the switches are not where you think they should be (near the room entrance) and don't turn-on/off the lights you think they should.

The only saving grace is that it seems to be all copper and it's a 200amp panel. I just have to go through and label all the switches. Or maybe it's worse than that.

I was trying to figure out what all the switches did and how to get all the light fixtures lit up. I couldn't get three of the wall sconses to light up no matter what switch combination I used. I pulled the sconces off the wall and found they weren't hooked up. Just hanging there, looking ugly.

There are two switches below one of the sconces. Since I couldn't figure out what they do, I pulled off the cover plate to see if they were hooked up at all. Here's what I found (bad).

Illegible duct tape labels and bare wires. Nice.

Hardwood Install - Done?

95% finished anyways. Long day yesterday and more time this morning, but the living room is done except for the nosing on one stair. I'll finish that up tonight and move the tools back up the stairs.

Close to crunch time

Move day is Saturday. I've got 500/1800 sq ft of hardwood installed and no time left to install it all. We've prioritized the list and decided that the family room must be completed so that we can put all the couches and bookshelves in there on Saturday.

So of course that's the hardest room to get ready for hardwood.

Actually, the room itself is not to bad as it has almost all square corners and no closet to install hardwood in. Problem is that it has (had) carpet with a tile surround.

The carpet ripped up easily, and Rosemary pulled out the staples fairly quickly. We took 3 hours to bash and then clean out the tile with a 5lb sledge and a hammer.

This left the original plywood subfloor covered with the grout and thinset used to put the tile on. The monkey that installed in used at least three kinds of thinset and they bonded with varying degrees of success to the plywood.

I flipped a quarter and decided to try and remove the thinset rather than rip out and replace the plywood. I asked a couple of flooring guys and ended up renting a Hilti TE 905-AVR Breaker Hammer. This is one bad ass tool. I got it with a 5" and 3" bit. It took me about 3 hours to clean off all the plywood to get it to a flush enough surface for the hardwood install. Well worth the rental. I think it was $50 for 4 hours. The rental place also sold the tool - $2000.

The right tool for the job.

The family room is only 400 ft so even allowing time for screwing down the subfloor, laying the felt, priming one section to cover up a dog piss smell, we should be able to get this done tonight and tomorrow. Then I get back to work on Joshua's bedroom.