NB and I started laying the hardwood last night. We ripped up the tar paper and the staples (I don't know how the tar paper was, but the little staples were pretty easy to remove). We're doing the tar paper as we go, now. We've got one strip down and we're covering it in hardwood.
So it's going well so far. We did about six rows last night. NB is putting the hardwood together and stapling it and I'm sawing the ends off. It's fun, at least for me. I'm starting to wonder whether I should get me a mitre saw and take up... I don't know. Sawing things.
Unfortunately, after laying about a box of hardwood last night, we realized that we'd miscalculated how much wood we'd need. We bought two extra boxes, but we're losing about a square foot and a half per box due to trimming, and it's likely that we'll use up part of the last box. So went back to Home Depot this morning to see if they had any boxes left. We found the pallet, but the colour we wanted was marked "All Sold". We asked whether the other stores might have some -- and luckily, they all did. We drove out to the 17th Street Home Depot to pick a couple extra boxes up.
When we got there, we discovered that the pallet was still up on the shelving, and would have to be taken down by forklift. The salesman helping us paged the Flooring Supervisor. We waited... and waited... and waited some more... finally, they managed to track down someone else who could use the forklift. We were almost embarrassed to have them take the whole pallet down just so we could buy two boxes.
Two hours after we left, we finally got our extra flooring home. We've opened up some of the other boxes and realized that the wood in those comes in slightly different lengths than the first box. NB is modifying his tiling program to tell us how to best tile our floor with a minimum of waste, and I'm just waiting around.
I should have some photos of the floor-in-progress to post later.
2 comments:
Hey - pretty soon you guys can be featured on some TV home renovation show. It's nice that you guys are working as a team. I keep Enshie away from my saws, otherwise she might want some fancy mitre saw too. Next thing you know she would be cutting up pork chops with it, and the dog would injure himself leaping up the wall trying to get all the meat bits off the wall.
But you didn't say how it looks yet! I liked laying the laminate floor because it was so neat to stand back and look at my progress.
And I see that NB is using a program to optimize the board utilization. He sounds just like me using my program to optimize the numbers of different length blocks to use for each row of the patio. I didn't do that for the laminate, though. I used the last cut-off piece from one row as the first piece of the next row - so the ragged cut end of each piece is under a baseboard (opposite walls). That way the cheapo engineer part of me is satisfied because there is no waste piece except at the very last row (or when the cut-off piece got too short to use).
If you have to wait for service here, you accept it as "Island Time". We found that some of the things we are getting originates on the mainland, and stores often ship on one barge per week. So everything seems to take a little longer. They must think that there are just a bunch of old retired fogies over here.
We thought the temperature here was supposed to be moderate, but it got too hot here last week. Still a nice breeze if we went down to the ocean, though.
We went to the Silly Boat Regatta yesterday. I will post several pictures of the Viking entry going nose down into the water. There is a booby prize to the first entry to sink, but I think we missed that because we got there late.
The floor looks great! It was kinda hard to tell after a foot and a half, but we've got about a third of the room done now and it looks very good. Hopefully I'll remember to post pictures tonight.
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