Front Room Flooring Campaign

This entry is pretty close to a cut-and-paste from our house changelog file.  I named this a "campaign" because "project" doesn't seem to cut it at this point.

The front room had a nasty pink/gray carpet stained by years of smoking.  We pulled it up and discovered about 80% of a hardwood floor.  Frankly, we'd been hoping for all of one.  It was very apparent that there had been termite damage to several dispersed parts of the floor, some of which had been crudely patched.  We weren’t keeping the carpet anyway so we pulled that and the tack strips keeping it down.

Original pink / gray carpet

Termite damage to boards adjacent to fireplace

This astonishingly crude patch seemed to have been made from a section of fencing – the taper for the top of the fence was still visible at the ends of the boards. 

Bottom of some termite-damaged boards – some of these crunched and gave when you walked on them – presumably the infestation was discovered when someone crushed the patched area.

Substantial sections of the boards were raised and fresh felt paper was laid under as it had been chewed through by the termites previously.  The subfloor seemed entirely fine to me / free of termite damage, from both sides, so it was left alone.  Guess it wasn't very tasty.  Fresh red oak flooring (same material as old flooring) was purchased to replace the damaged boards.  Undamaged boards were retained (at least the ones I bought up off the subfloor without shattering them) and we mixed new and old boards when installing the patches to make the sections blend better.  I bought unfinished because the whole thing will need sanding and finishing at the end anyway and they're cheaper that way.

A damaged section of flooring also ran near one of the baseboard vents, which made it make sense to replace the vent there with a floor vent in the double-width gap already cut in the floor before we got there (see top left of picture above).  The ducting in the crawlspace was re-routed and re-hung to this location next to an existing vent, also re-insulated without the use of twine (HVAC tape people, how hard is it?)  New register boxes were installed as well, with a patch to the subfloor around them to support the whole deal.

Flush-mount wooden register grates were installed – looks pretty slick to us.  I used splines around and between the register grates so the tongue-in-grove runs all the way around them.  The baseboard vent grating would have been where the rightmost strip of new boards touches the wall.

Lots of hammering later it all looked pretty good but there was one problem.

There was a gap where the patch met original flooring of about 1/4" or so – very visible and not good enough for me. The entire tongue of the boards in this gap could be seen and the whole run had to be face-nailed in place until I figured out how to do a better job.  Apparently between the new boards and the good job placing the patch the same number of boards didn’t cover the same space.  This gap was eventually addressed by purchasing 3/4” thick face-planed red oak boards of width wider than needed, cutting them to the correct width, and making custom floorboards with them for that run using a router and jig setup.  Between this and some hardwood splines tongue-in-groove was put in place for the entire run and the gap is now eliminated. 

Making those custom boards took a long time (about 75% of it on setup and test, manufacture was actually pretty quick) but man they went in nicely.  I’m proud of those suckers.

Tongue-in-groove was also added for that entire run – note negligible gap.  You can’t tell which ones I made from the others without a ruler or really staring at which run is slightly bigger.  The boards were driven in from one side rather than dropped in and did not require face-nailing (except the last one which had to be drop-in short of taking out a wall) to be absolutely solid.

That takes this floor to "ready for sanding and staining" along with most of the rest of the house.  I may put those flush-mounted registers in in some other places and the floor is slightly missing around one grating in my office (you can see into the basement), but overall those efforts are single-afternoon affairs.  This - this was big.  Seems likely to be 100+ man hours all told.  I am so glad to have finished, every time I walk by the room I am happy to see it (and all the tools, etc) not there waiting for me any more.

I also installed a new microwave over the range (old one died, been using the one from Japan in the meantime) and replaced the tacky neon blue / clear plastic fan in the kitchen with a light fixture, amongst other things I shall probably not blog.  First few months of term absolutely nuts, didn't work on the house from the end of July until mid-October.  Finally beginning to make up for it now.