Holey concrete, Batman.

Posted on September 12, 2012 by The Boy

Recently, The Girl and I enjoyed a typical POS Sunday. We spent quality time walking up and down the aisles of Home Depot, looking for ways to fix the existing problems at the house. Or ways to create new problems. Usually the latter.

On this particular trip we had a specific goal: put a hole in the concrete pad outside the back door of the garage.

The Offending Area.

No, not just for the fun of it. Our house is slightly downhill of the house next to us, which means that when it rains, the water runs toward our house. Making the problem even worse is that there is a retention wall surrounding the door. The retention wall keeps the soil from eroding away from the neighbor’s house, and keeps that soil from piling up against our door. Unfortunately, it makes a nice little area for the water to pool, and pool it does. The Girl and I have seen the water fill the area at least 8 inches high.

When the water fills that area, it has nowhere to flow, and eventually starts to leak into the garage. It runs through the garage and to the garage door. Because this has been happening for years, the garage door is rusting through at the bottom. That’s another project for another day.

So – back to Home Depot. We settled on a hole saw solution where we would drill through the pad, and then vacuum out the soil below the hole, and fill it with rocks, making a rough french drain solution. Unfortunately, the largest hole saw that we could find had a 2 inch diameter. I’m not convinced that this will be enough drainage, so we may have to widen the hole later, or add a second drain.

Oh man – here’s the best part. We’ve got a few drills. An impact driver, a standard drill, and ol’ busted drill. None are hammer drills. This project required a hammer drill. YES! So, The Girl and I walked out with a new drill bit, a drain cover, AND A NEW DRILL!

The newest member of our tool family.

With the shopping out of the way, it was time to get down to serious business. I loaded up the new drill with the new drill bit, swept an area clean outside the door, and started to drill through the concrete. It was a slow process. It was hot outside. There was a lot of concrete dust. I would not be deterred.

The drilling took about thirty minutes, which was about twenty five minutes longer than I expected. The drill worked wonderfully though, but I would warn anyone using a hammer drill for the first time, it’s pretty intense.

The large cylinders of cement I removed.

The extensive injuries I suffered.

Finally, there was a neat and tidy hole in the concrete, all the way through to the soil below. Next, I grabbed the shop vac (named Snuffaluffagus) and removed a bunch of the dirt under the pad. Then I put the drain cover on the hole, and voila! The only thing left to do was to test the drain.

And … I put the drain in the wrong place. The concrete pad actually seems to have a slight angle to it, meaning that the water pools in the corner, and I put the drain in the center. Which REALLY means that at some point in the near future I will need to repeat the process, hopefully with a 4 inch saw and drain this time to allow for higher drainage.

But, for now, mission accomplished!

What Wood You Do?

Posted on September 7, 2012 by The Girl

As you saw in the demo post, we removed all of the tile flooring in the entire house, except two bedrooms that had very cheap laminate, which we left temporarily. Having mostly cement floors has been rough on the feet and paws, but great for construction, painting, adopting The Dog, etc., because we don’t have to be even the slightest bit careful about damaging the floor. I will be the first to admit that I am one of the clumsiest people in the Tampa Bay area, if not the entire state. A few examples: in a high school softball game I stepped on my own hand running bases and blew the game, I broke my collar bone riding a bicycle as a kid, broke my foot riding a bicycle as an adult, tripped and fell flat on my face 3 times in one evening (sober – I swear!), I shot myself in the thighmeat with a staple gun, and very recently hit my hand, head, and butt simultaneously while in a bathroom stall. I now understand why The Boy comes running (ok, sprinting) into the garage any time I am out there alone and he hears a power tool start up. I cannot be trusted.

Our idiot-proof floors cannot stick around forever, unfortunately. I nonchalantly shopped for at least 8 months looking for hardwood, nice laminate, or engineered hardwood flooring, and everything was just so expensive. We have at least 1,100 square feet to cover. I scoured every ReStore in central Florida, Craigslist, Floor & Decor, etc. Eventually I stumbled across very affordable oak factory seconds on Ebay from a company in New York state. (“New York City?!?” haha)

The catch with factory seconds is that each board was rejected in the quality control process for some reason. We had to buy 1.5 times what we needed, to allow for lots of unusable pieces. The grand total came to around $1,400, almost half of which was for shipping. $1,400 for unfinished solid oak flooring, when we were looking at $3 – $4,000 for engineered floors. A steal, right?? When the three pallets arrived, were squeezed into our two car garage, and I realized the enormity of the project, I started to have doubts.

It has become a time-consuming hot mess of an idea. We decided to do one bedroom first, since we need breaks at every bedroom door anyways to allow for expansion and contraction (the gap will be covered with transition strips). Plus, we wanted to “practice” laying floors before we attempted it in the main living area. Before we could start laying any flooring, though, we had to inspect every. single. piece. of. wood. and. cut. off. any. flaws. Oh yeah. We have quite the knack for choosing to tackle the most unpleasant outdoor/garage/attic tasks in the dead of summer. In Florida. Yay.

We got started, and were surprised by how much was too damaged for use. Admittedly, we were too picky at first, and have relaxed a lot, but plenty of pieces were split completely, or had large knots that you could put your fingers through, and we salvaged as much as we could.

Blank slate.

Bringing wood in to acclimate. This was maybe 1/20th of the amount we needed for this room.

The other obstacle was that we were floating the floor (not much option with a cement subfloor), so after the underlayment, we glued each piece to the next. It creates a very secure and sturdy bond, but it was hard to keep the wood very tight to the next piece. We used long clamps for as much as we could, but eventually the clamps were not long enough.

The first section.

The first section done.

The limit of our clamps’ reach, so we started taping pieces together and try to hold them tight.

Finally done! (Laid, anyways)

Next up was tool rental! I get pretty excited when we get to rent a tool. It makes me feel like I’m legit. “Look at me! They rent expensive tools to me! I must know what I am doing!” Once again, we turned to THG Rentals for all of our renting needs, and this beast was ours for the weekend:

The drum sander. [Insert Tim the “Tool Man” Taylor grunt]

“Who is our new friend?”

Here I am rocking the sander:

Rockin’ it.

Oh hello!

The trick with the drum sander is to keep it moving at all times! If it is running, it needs to be moving. There is a lever that puts the sanding drum in contact with the floor, and we would start moving before we pushed the lever down. The Boy had the bright idea to run across the planks, instead of with the grain, to sand down any high spots … I do NOT recommend that. Go with the grain. The other issue is that the round drum doesn’t get close enough to the wall, so going back and forth, we started making valleys near the walls. We did use a handheld power sander to go around the edges, corners, and a few spots in the closet that were hard to get to, but those valleys were virtually impossible to smooth with the hand sander. If I had it to do all over again (and I do! yay?) I would like to try a different type of power sander.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much sawdust the bag collected. However, after the sanding was done, I started cleaning the room to prepare for staining the floors, and discovered that sawdust had invaded every crevice. The shelves in the closet, a fine coating on the walls, an adorable tiny pile on every light switch and outlet cover, and completely coating the blinds. The aftermath of this project and the growing pile of sawdust in our garage led to the naming of our blog, so I suppose I can’t be too upset.

Picking a stain color was tough, because although I prefer a very dark shade, many people warned me that it would show every speck of dust, and we have quite a bit of that floating around our house, not to mention dog hair.

I conducted a Facebook poll to select a stain color, and the middle won!

It is Dark Walnut from Minwax, which Home Depot oddly does not carry in gallons (only in 8 oz., quart, and weird marker thing sizes). Yet they have other stain colors in gallons. I wish I could have been at the meeting where this decision was made.

“All in favor of carrying gallons of Minwax in Dark Walnut, say yea.”

[Crickets]

“All opposed?”

“Boo! Boo! Rubbish. Filth. Slime. Muck. Boo Boo Boo!”

(The Boy is totally impressed by my Princess Bride quote.) I ultimately saved the day by finding a gallon at Lowe’s. Whew. Crises averted. We bought a cheaper version of this stain applicator, but I could not find the one we bought on the website:

We started in one corner and worked our way out. The Boy applied, while I moved things out of his way and re-filled his stain tray.

This was the only progress picture I managed to take, since we had to work quickly from here.

When we were almost done, I stood on my tippy toes in the corner with an old cotton sheet, and waited. Once we felt the stain had set enough, and my arches were cramping, I put the sheet down and used my double-socked feet to kind of drag it along the floor. This step is pretty important because only so much stain soaks into the wood, and any excess will become tacky. Afterwards, we had this:

It smells of rich ~~mahogany~~ walnut.

After this dried overnight, the next morning I went in to take a peek. I believe I have mentioned that patience is a virtue I do not enjoy. I marveled at our accomplishment, backed out of the room, and looked down to see a very distinct outline of my foot. Oops. Won’t make that mistake again! After waiting more time than required (that can of stain is a liar, and now I know why Home Depot won’t allow it in their stores!) we went back in and put a second coat on a few lighter areas. Finally, two coats of polyurethane later (applied using a roller on an extension pole), and we had a beautiful new floor.

Ta Dah!

Since we re-tiled the kitchen and the entryway, we now need to lay this flooring in the living room, dining room, hallway, and the remaining two bedrooms. However, since we still have one bathroom left to gut and remodel, we are going to wait on those floors. Until then, we will continue to squeeze around the pallets in the garage and have no room to work out there. Remodeling isn’t always fun, almost never glamorous, but it is very often rewarding!

Sew What?

Posted on September 6, 2012 by The Boy

Entertaining The Dog is a full-time job. She is not very good at entertaining herself, mostly because she destroys any toys we get for her within about eleven minutes of us handing the toy to her. Makes for expensive and very short-lived fun for her.

Recently, The Girl and I did a little “spring cleaning.” What that meant was that we pulled a box out of the closet that we hadn’t unpacked since moving in to go through it. Please don’t judge. In our zealous cleaning, we discovered behind the box an old body pillow. The Girl no longer needs a body pillow, as she has, well…me. Also The Dog. Seeing as the body pillow was just taking up space, we put it in a pile of stuff to take to Goodwill. The Dog does not understand Goodwill. The Dog understands “anything on the ground is a toy.” So, she immediately grabbed it in her teeth and thrashed it about. Right on cue, eleven minutes later, she had torn a hole in the pillow case and looked to be on the brink of killing yet another toy.

But this time, this time I would intervene. This time there would NOT be another dead toy tossed into the trashcan. NAY! I am resourceful. I am creative. I am old enough to be comfortable saying that I am in touch with my softer side (which happens to be my midsection). I would save the day by CREATING a durable pillowcase, thus allowing The Dog to continue thrashing the pillow around like a great white on a seal pup. Like a monkey on a cupcake. Like a…well, i’m out of analogies.

Here’s a free tip: Michael’s does not have fabric. None. Not even a bit. Joann’s FABRICS? Yeah – they’ve got fabric. Not like “fabric” is in the name of the store or anything. Am I resourceful, yes. Am I bright, not always.

I got duck cloth. It’s not made of ducks, it doesn’t feel like ducks, it doesn’t have a duck pattern. It IS very durable though. Seriously I spent about thirty minutes looking at all the different fabrics. Eventually, it came down to a choice between the duck cloth and denim but the duck cloth just felt a little more sturdy. And it was more fun to say. Duck cloth.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to sew. I mean, I’ve mended a few things with needle and thread, but I was making a pillow case to cover a four foot tall pillow, so hand sewing that bad boy was just out of the question (full disclosure – I tried to hand sew it. The experiment ended with a lot of cursing and very little progress). Fortunately, The Girl’s family was coming for a visit, and they promised to bring a sewing machine. The Girl’s family isn’t quite sure what to make of the fact that she ended up with a guy who wants to learn to sew, but they seem to have accepted me for who I am. They are good people.

Here we are trying to figure out the sewing machine:

It took a while, but The Girl’s mom finally managed to teach me how to run the sewing machine.

I was the baby bird, flying out of the nest for the first time. Any success I had was due to the fact that I had an excellent coach. I managed to stitch some velcro on the inside of the top of the pillow case, then run a seam down the side and the bottom of the pillow case. After that, the only thing left to do was case the pillow and see if The Dog would go after it with as much vigor as she did previously.

Here’s the answer:

Pillow Fights are never as sexy as they sound.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, and dogs. The Boy was able to competently work a sewing machine, make a pillow case, save a pillow from being discarded, and entertain The Dog, all for the low low price of about $9 in fabric, and two hours of learning and working time.