Bernadette's Pony

We killed two birds with one stone last week. We divided off a part of the downstairs kitchen, and we finally found a use for the "Bernadette doors."

The big cooktop and range downstairs backs up to the swinging door into the kitchen. It's an ugly thing to see when you enter the kitchen, but it's functional and it keeps idle foot traffic out of the cooking area. It's been this way since we got the range about a year ago.

Last week, we built a little half-high pony wall behind the range to shield it from view and make the entry into the kitchen a bit nicer. It's nothing substantial: just some 2x4 framing covered with 1/4-inch drywall. I even turned the 2x4 sideways so the wall is thinner than standard. The whole thing is anchored to the floor and the kitchen wall, and has a cutout near the bottom to accommodate the big gas shutoff valve.

That part was all pretty straightforward, but to dress it up we re-hung the old kitchen cabinet doors we'd saved from our upstairs kitchen remodel back in 2010. If you recall, that kitchen had a bunch of old, falling-down cabinets with hand-painted doors signed "Bernadette." We saved the doors and they've been sitting in the garage all this time. We knew we wanted to keep them, but we never had a good use for them -- until now.

Turns out, our little pony wall is exactly the right size for five of the Bernadette doors. Four of them are a matched set, so we mounted them with their hinged sides outward, and even bought new knobs for them, as if this was a kitchen cupboard. The fifth one is the same height as the others but a different width, so it lives off to one side. There are still two or three oddly shaped doors left in the garage. We may mount them up on the walls as decoration. No reason to leave them behind.

One of the doors was badly weathered when we took it down. Maybe it got more direct sunlight than the others, or maybe it got splashed by the sink over decades of use; we're not sure what happened. Kathy's done a good job of matching the green paint that Bernadette used and she's touching up some of the damaged areas. It won't be a perfect match, but it already looks a lot better than before. And now people coming into the downstairs kitchen can look at Bernadette's hand-painted doors instead of the steely backside of our range. Much better.

So Clean You Can Eat Off It

Floor's done!

It took exactly three days, just like they said, and our new floor is entirely finished. Done and dusted, you might say.

We're thrilled. The third floor has gone from stained wall-to-wall carpet, to grubby subfloor, to new oak hardwood. It took us about four years in total, but the important part was over in three days. Why didn't we do this sooner?

The tricky parts were around the balusters holding up the stair rail. Normally (i.e., in a modern house) you can twist those to remove them and then lay the floor underneath and reinstall the railing. No such luck. Our balusters are permanently fixed. That didn't stop one of the installers from testing them every few hours, though, as if something might have changed since the last time he tried it.

We told them it was okay to floor right up to the base of the railing, since that's what was done on the second floor. It looks fine and avoids the nasty work of having to cut off the railing and somehow reinstall it.

Kathy and I spent most of the evening putting our furniture back. Next, we'll rescue our belongings from where we've piled them downstairs. I figure we'll remember where to find about half of it. The rest may be lost forever. Something for the next owners to wonder about.

Four on the Floor

It's Day Two of flooring installation, and it's going very well. The four installers finished Kathy's room and worked partway into my room and the hallway that connects the two. The boards are pre-finished, so the parts they've completed really are done. There won't be any messy sanding or sealing afterwards.

The toughest part -- for us, at least -- is playing Musical Chairs with all the furniture. When you put down a new floor, everything has to come out of the room. It's like moving to a new house, minus the moving boxes. We had to move almost an entire floor's worth of beds, bookcases, chairs, and other furniture to somewhere.

Fortunately, the installers allowed us to push some things to the  back of the guest room if we promised to move it all again to the other end when they needed to get in there. Deal. It's better than moving bed frames and bookcases down a flight of stairs (and back up again when they're done).

Then there's the dust. Nailing down a floor is pretty clean work, but a lot of the boards need to be cut first, and that makes sawdust. Kathy's room, in particular, needed a lot of cut work because she's located under the "witch's cap" tower of the house, so that part needed a lot of angled cuts.

By the end of the day, the installers estimated they'd need only one more day to finish -- maybe one day and a bit. We'll find out tomorrow how far they get.

Floor Show, Act I

Woo-hoo! Our new hardwood is going in on the third floor!

Kathy and I drained a lot of wine bottles discussing how and when we'd install new flooring upstairs. At first, we figured we'd do it ourselves. How hard can it be, right? But as the year wore on and we found ourselves juggling quite enough other projects, thank you, the sensible alternative of hiring pros started to sound a lot better.

So a week after the materials were delivered, the four-man team of installers showed up bright and early on Monday morning. We'd already cleared out the furniture and removed all the offending trim and baseboards to make everything ready for them. Surprisingly, they agreed. Everything was ready to go and they wasted no time before hammering away.

Kathy and I had also spent a lot of hours wondering whether we'd prefer to run the floorboards this way or that way. Should they run left-to-right or front-to-back? Should they align down the hallway or across the room? What would look better? What do other people do? What do the experts say?

We needn't have bothered. The boards have to run perpendicular to the underlying subfloor. You don't get a choice. Okay, problem solved, then. Nailing the floorboards athwart the subfloor also makes everything stronger and helps eliminate squeaks, so that's a bonus.

The installers started in the middle and worked outwards, nailing the very first board in Kathy's doorway. That way, if the rooms aren't square (if?), the uneven boards will be against the outside walls and partially hidden by new baseboards.

These guys are fast. One unpacks boxes of oak floorboards and spreads them out on the floor. A second one unrolls black backing paper onto the subfloor, and the third guy nails each board down using a pneumatic flooring gun. The fourth one mans the chop saw, cutting off board ends to fit the space.

Every once in a while they all stop to rearrange the loose boards lying on the floor. There's a real art to this. For starters, you don't want the board ends to line up; they should all be staggered, but in such a way that you don't see a stair step pattern. You also want to mix up the boards between boxes. We got about 23 boxes of flooring in all, and the boards from each box will naturally come from different oak trees. (That would be one big tree otherwise.) So there will be variations in color, grain, and so on. You want to mix those up so that one room isn't all dark, loose-grained wood while another room is lighter, tighter oak. So they stir up the pieces as they go along. When it's all done, your eye shouldn't be able to pick out any patterns, stripes, or light/dark areas.

This is going to be a noisy week.

Hey, Sparky!

I guess we should have seen this one coming.

When the floor installers were here (more on that project soon), they accidentally cut through a wire that we didn't know was there. It sparked and tripped the circuit breaker, in addition to startling the poor guy. The net effect was that it cut off power to Kathy's upstairs office and to my closet, but most other things on the 3rd floor seemed to work okay.

Our job then became finding the cut wire and figuring out where/how it was routed. Again, we didn't even know it was there. We thought we'd uncovered all the hidden wiring when we removed the baseboards. Guess not.

The tricky thing was, we couldn't find any wire where the guy said he'd cut it. He'd sliced something with his Dremel tool and made sparks, but I couldn't see any wire, or even any indication that there was wiring nearby. Had he mistaken the location? Was I looking in the wrong place? What gives?

We pried off some molding, unscrewed some outlets, tugged on some wires, and came to the inescapable conclusion that there must be some invisible wiring right about... here. And sure enough, we dug away at the corner of the room and found it carefully buried underneath layers of plaster. They'd somehow stuck a vertical run of wire in the seam where two walls meet. Crafty. And totally nonstandard and unsafe.

I wound up disassembling two closets, one in Kathy's office and one in mine, to uncover this run and figure out where it started and where it ended. And then it started to get weird.

There wasn't just one wire buried vertically in the wall, there were two. One was live and one wasn't. Huh? How does that work? Turns out, there was a tape splice down near the floor, entirely buried in the wall. The floor installer had apparently cut one leg of the Y, leaving half of the circuit working and half dead. Great. So now we get to deal with an unsafe tape splice inside a wall as well as two sets of buried wire. This just gets better and better.

The live half of the circuit led to another tape splice, also buried. And tracing the wire back to its source revealed a third tape splice, also buried inside a wall. Sheesh. Haven't these people heard of junction boxes? Or was taping up and plastering over your wiring normal back in the day?

Little by little, we managed to dig most of the wiring out of its hiding place. We'll probably leave a few short runs in place, but disconnected from everything, simply because it's too much trouble to dig it out and would damage the walls unnecessarily.

To make up for the missing/damaged wiring, I ran some shiny new Romex -- grounded, this time -- from a nearby outlet, around the top of a door frame, and over to the corner of the room. We're approaching our goal of having zero ungrounded outlets in the house. And we're a bit closer to eliminating or abandoning most of the old wiring.

As long as there are no more surprises, that it.