Floor Wars III

First, there was the bedroom.

Then came the kitchen.

Now it's time for the dining room. And this time, they're not taking any prisoners.

Floor Wars III: Chemical Warfare.

We've always wanted to remove the carpet from the second-floor rooms. We did the master bedroom almost a year ago (has it really been that long?) and the kitchen floor got redone (or revealed, really) just a few months ago. The carpet's old, red, and badly stained. Running a restaurant will do that. No amount of cleaning would get the big lasagna spills off the carpet. So out it goes!

We took a little peek under the dining room carpet a few months back. We were hopeful that we'd find hardwood underneath, like we did in the bedroom. And so it turned out to be: nice oak planks under the padding and tack strips.

On Sunday Kathy and I took a knife to the dining room carpet and ripped it out in chunks. It was all over in less than an hour. (Hey, we're getting good at this!) But alas, the floor was badly stained; it was even worse than the paint splatters we'd found on the bedroom floor. This one's got big splotches of green adhesive goo. It's the consistency of green Crayola crayon melted all over the wood.

Our trusty eco-friendly orange-flavored stripper hardly did anything to it. It smelled nice, but it just wasn't taking the adhesive off. So we called out the big guns. I got some extra-nasty stuff from "Uri." It comes in cans labeled in Russian, straight from Chernobyl. The fumes make you see things. The can gets warm for no reason. You have to throw the brushes away after 15 minutes. This stuff works.

Even so, it took four coats to remove the larger spills. I put it on, stand back for 20 minutes, then scrape the green mutagenic ooze off into a bucket. Lather, rinse, repeat. I'm afraid to leave it on the bare wood; it'll probably start a fire.

At any rate, the floor is mostly stripped now, as are my fingers. My normally reliable nitrile gloves disintegrated on my hands. I found it's better to work bare-handed, because then at least you remember not to scratch your nose.

Once the evil smell subsides we'll follow the usual pattern: sand, stain, and topcoat. We're going to match the stain we used in the bedroom because we like it and because we want the floors on this level to match. Changing stains between rooms would just look weird. Like having green splotches in your dining room.

Before and After: Door

One of the many small projects I've been working on is the laundry room door. This is upstairs, just off the kitchen, and leads to the outside stairs (which are now gone). Like everything else in this little laundry room, the door was ragged and nasty.

It has some panels of colored glass in it, which is nice, but the window putty was falling out and the wind whistled around some of the glass panes. The woodwork was in bad shape, too. In particular, the lower left panel was missing entirely and had been boarded up with a sheet of plywood. You can see it here in the "before" picture.

I took out each of the nine glass panels, scraped off all the old putty, cleaned the glass, put them back in, put in new glazier's points and replaced all the putty. This took a lot longer than I expected; puttying takes a long time!

Then I fabricated a new wooden panel out of MDF. Since the original panel used tongue-and-groove, there was no way to insert a new panel without taking the entire door apart. It's kind of like one of those 15-square puzzles. So I made the panel out of eight interlocking pieces (four inside and four outside) so that it fit snugly into the opening and was the same thickness as the originals. Then I glued the raised piece into the middle after routing and beveling it to match the others. A little bead of caulk softened the edges enough that the center piece looks like part of the main panel and not glued on.

I also took off the brass doorknobs and hardware and stripped the paint off everything. This plate was completely white before; it had been painted over--many times--and was nearly invisible against the white door. A little stripping, scraping, and polishing and now they look pretty good.

Some of the smaller wood trim pieces have small details that 20-odd layers of paint had obscured. I stripped these as best I could, with multiple applications of eco-friendly wood stripper, but in the end I resorted to scraping with a screwdriver and pick. I got most of the old paint out, but not all.

Now I've glued, nailed, and puttied everything back together and slapped on a bit of primer. Here's the almost-finished door, with the new panel on the left and the original on the right. Not bad, huh?

I'll wait for the putty to set before I paint the top half of the door. I don't want to disturb the glass while I scrape away paint splatters. Besides, it gives me an excuse to take some time off from the door.

Up the Non-Staircase

Demolition is always more fun than construction.

It's usually easier, too. Or at least, is requires less skill and finesse. I can hit, beat, and break stuff with the best of 'em. Today's example: our back staircase.

These stairs went from the backyard up to the second-floor laundry room. They turned the corner around two sides of the house, as you can see. They're not original; they were built in the 1930s when the house was converted into two apartments. The second-floor renters needed a way to get in/out of their upstairs unit without disturbing the ground-floor occupants,. Hence, these stairs.

They were built entirely of redwood, just like everything else in the house. Sadly, even redwood decays over time and these things had to go. In fact, they were officially condemned by the city before we even bought the house. It's all we could do to close the deal without demolishing them first. But we did have to promise to never, ever use them. (I promise. Cross my heart.)

Because of that, the city had no problem approving our plans to rebuild the steps in a different location. We never did like these stairs much, and probably would have demolished them eventually anyway. The red-tag notice from the city just gave us a convenient government-approved excuse.

That's a lot of redwood to throw away. Some of it was fine. A few of the boards came off in one piece and were still bright salmon-pink inside. Others were rotted through and really needed to go. Naturally, the rotted boards came off easily. It's the good ones that were hard to remove.

At any rate, the upstairs door is now locked shut, and I've nailed a few 2x4's across the doorway just in case. We're this close to starting on the new stairs (at least, that's what the builder keeps telling us) so we figured it was time to take these down. Besides, the weather was nice and it's always fun to destroy stuff.