Showing posts with label pine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pine. Show all posts

Thursday, September 22, 2011

The Pine Floor - Part Quatre

Things are really coming together in Eric's office:
I really wish that photo wasn't distorted - the knee wall is perfectly straight, but doesn't photograph that way.  Trust me when I say -  it's straight.

The electrical outlet under the window is for the radiant heater we're putting in this room.  It's the Flex model from Calorigen.  Since this room is in the north-west corner of the house and although everything is rebuilt and reinsulated, we're not messing around.  I'll give a full, sordid review later, since we already installed an 800W Flex heater in the guest room last winter.  It doesn't make winter any shorter, but it sure ups the comfort of the house.

Eric used his little hand-held Dewalt circular saw to straighten out the long gouge in the floor, and cut a 1" x 1" square plug to fit the length of the hole.  Everything's epoxied into place, and sanded down:

Here's an up-close beauty shot:
That's about as fixed as things can get, without ripping out the floor boards (and idea we did entertain today, though).  But more on that below...

With regards to the spaces between the boards, we've decided to paint a few of them with copious amounts of paint and evaluate the look when the paint has dried.  Then, we'll decide if we're able to live with the end result or not.  If we hate the appearance, well, then we'll remove the crud with the Fein Multimaster tool, and go from there.  Truth be told, if anyone dares to get down on hands and knees and inspect the gaps between the boards once the floor's painted, all they're gonna get out of it is a swift kick in the ass.

I should have given myself a swift kick in the ass for even having taken this photo:
5/16" of crud, bay-bee!  We're both (officially - yeah!) sick and tired of spending another moment on our hands and knees in this room.  To hell with integrity.  We're gonna paint over it and move on.

But Houston, we have a problem:
After much reading, we decided to use Zinsser BIN primer as a base coat.  It stuck like misery to the world to the knots, as well as the epoxy repairs.  But on the original floor itself, it scratches off easily.  We're not going to top-coat this three times only to have the primer not adhere properly, so we're at an impasse until we find a solution.
 
I have to mention that this scratch test was done mere hours after application, so I think Eric's really jumping the gun with his worrying.  24 hours later, it was much, much more resistant.   Eric's still skeptical though, but I maintain he's worried about nothing.

The Zinsser BIN is really thin and splatters when applied with a 5/8" nap roller, hence we used blue paper we bought from the auto body-shop down the street to protect the paint job.  Thinking outside of the box is our specialty - plus we didn't feel like driving to Home Depot for such a trivial item.

Eric did some more research after his "failed" scratch test and concluded that our original floor finish is probably Flecto Varathane.  This would mean sanding off every little bit (did you hear me?:  EVERY.LITTLE.BIT.) of remaining residue, and while this room only measures 10' x 12', we will eventually have the entire upstairs to do.  We also need to take into consideration that the floor has already been sanded down once, and that about a 1/4" was taken off at that time.  This is important because our floor is structural, so taking off any more wood with a commercial sander really isn't an option.

Right now, things are looking like Eric's going to take the floor to task with the belt sander again, much to his chagrin and dismay.  But that option sounds better than his earlier idea of overlaying the entire floor with tamarack (our wood-pusher had a deal...), or even worse, ripping out the entire floor and starting fresh.

Of course, these ideas come to Eric like little flashes of lightning, and then promptly get relayed to me at work by telephone, when I'm helpless to grab him by the shoulders, shake him hard, and say, "Get a grip, man!"

But first, we've had another collective "a-ha" moment, so...cue the sand blaster and stay tuned for part five.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Knotty Pine Purgatory

This is not a suspicion of mine. I have long since known that hell is paved not with good intentions, but with knotty pine. However, one proverbial quality of hell was absent on the morning of December 8th, and that would be heat:
Yes. That reads 45°F. That’s 8.5°C, but just as cold whether in F or C. And please note, this is not the great outdoors, but a room in our very own Knotty Pine Purgatory. This was a little experiment I conducted as the outside temperature plummeted to -20°C with a wind-chill prohibitively howling at around -29. (At those temps, you’re frost-bitten in about 20 minutes, Celsius or Fahrenheit, who cares, what matters is that you have multiple coatings of thermonuclear polar fleece on every square inch of your body.) To conduct this little experiment, however, all I needed to do was close the door to the guest room for the night and watch the temperature drop.
Well, it was 45°F in our guest room that morning, the much heralded and much loved room that all our guests comment on. It also proves my point, that if I had “too much wool” or “too many clothes” the room would have better insulation and wouldn’t be this cold, but once again, I am digressing.
It is glaringly obvious that we need to renovate our upstairs, and the day that we will start the tear-down is fast approaching. We have a deadline of next May to have the work completed, or we forfeit the rebate we will receive under the EcoEnergy Retrofit Program sponsored by our federal government. We pay enough taxes, so it would be nice if some of it actually went back into our pockets, and not out the window like our heat.
You see the vacuum-cleaner in the above photo? It NEVER gets put away - I think if it did, we'd suffocate on dog and cat hair. And the Rubbermaid bins? They are for my wool collection that is currently housed in the guest room and needs to be moved out at all costs. And the post made of 2 x 4's? It serves no purpose, and there are 2 of them. I can just picture the space we are going to gain when these come down!
Guests think our upstairs looks "so cozy", (I think they're being polite, after all cozy is just a euphemism for unbelievable mess)...they love the knotty-pine look (so do I, but I don’t want to live in it), and think it feels just like Grandma’s house. On some points, they are right. Knotty pine is nice when you’ve rented a ski chalet in Vermont, and it is cozy when it’s insulated, but there is exactly no insulation behind the pine whatsoever. That this house has been standing 150 years and no one has thought about this detail concerns me a bit. Although we replaced the windows with high-efficiency argon-filled thermal panes, the walls are bare: from the inside, we have knotty pine, some furring strips, and great spaces of nothing but space. Cold Space.
We aren’t exactly sure how long the knotty pine has been up, but one thing is for sure: whoever did the job was a “weekend warrior” when it came to home renovation.
In some places, the boards don’t even join, the doors have such major gaps, I can literally stick my hand under one door, and generally, just the fact there is no insulation warrants a major renovation.
So this winter, we are going to tear down all the pine, get right down to the outside exterior wall that is comprised of 1) horizontal pine (Eastern True Fir or Hemlock) , 3” thick by 12” high joined by tongue-and-groove, clad on the inside with 1½” thick vertical boards, some up to 14” wide. Due to water infiltration, years, mice and rot, some of these boards will have to be replaced, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Eric is going to put up 2”x6” studs and insulate with 6” Roxul Flexibatt (fireproof) to give us a R22 rating, the same as the insulation in the roof (after we removed the sawdust and re-insulated!) We will probably use the Ayr-Foil barrier again, because we are convinced that it makes a huge difference in heating and cooling based on its use downstairs, even if it is a bitch to install. (I am sure some of these R&D types have never held a hammer before, but again, I am digressing…)
Right now we are having trouble getting the insulation; it seems Roxul is behind in deliveries, and with the up-coming holiday and maintenance shutdowns, who knows when we will be able to get what we need. None of our home-renovation big-box stores that carry this product have it in stock, nor are they able to tell us if they even have some ordered. Bullsh!t is all I can say; I've been on both sides of that coin, and I know when to cry foul. We even wanted to PRE-PAY 40 bags' worth - that's a $1200 order - but no one seems to be capable of taking an order like that. Cash and carry is nice when the product is in stock...but really...40 bags is nearly a truck-load and no one can place an order? Wow. And have you ever tried to contact any one at Home Depot? Talk about the royal run-around. When you finally do get someone on the phone, don't expect any semblance of precise information, just be thankful you actually managed to get through to a live human being. Eric ended up going to the store with a friend's pick-up and trailer to get 10 bags that were "in stock" (ha ha), only to be told that, "Oops, we are so sorry, it seems we don't have any at all!". Gee, thanks for the heads-up! Grrrr...don't get me started. Seems no one wants to be accountable for anything, anymore.
So keep tuned. All I want is Gyproc, all over…then we’ll talk about paint, paneling and what-not. Some insulation, a sink and toilet, and of course, a bit more closet space.
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