Got Wood? II

A couple of hardwood areas needed special repairs. Apparently, during the carpeting process the installers felt it necessary to remove a few floorboards, which they patched with plywood. That's fine if it's hidden under a carpet but not so cool if you're gonna be exposing the floors.

Trouble is, that flooring isn't made anymore. It's all American white oak cut in two-inch by half-inch boards with tongue-and-groove. Oak flooring isn't hard to find, but it's tough to get the right dimensions. Modern T&G flooring is either wider, thicker, or both. We needed an exact match.

None of the local lumberyards had any good options, and the local floor stores came up dry, too. A local mill could make 'em for us, but the price would be prohibitive. Finally, we came across one source that could get us a small amount (about 20 square feet) if I paid in cash and didn't need a receipt. My favorite kind.

A little cutting, trimming, and shaping later, we've got our replacement boards. They don't seem to take stain quite as readily as the original boards, but that may be because they're newer/younger. We're pretty sure this floor was originally laid in 1936, so the wood itself is probably around 100 years old. A second stain coat may do the trick.

Here you can see the new and old boards together. The foreground and upper left are old wood; the upper right has the new stuff. There's a seam between the two areas because that's how we found it. The previous owners had evidently cut the floor and/or moved a wall in this area. We can't eliminate the cut but at least we can match the wood as closely as possible and then put a threshold strip over the seam.

The Sands of Time

After ripping out all the second-floor carpet, we chemically stripped (most of) the goo that was holding down the carpet padding. Some rooms were worse than others, but they all needed attention.

That job completed, the next step was to sand down the floors and (we hoped) sand off the last remnants of goo that the toxic sludge couldn't take off. We rented the very same floor sander we used last May--exactly one year ago!--and hauled that sucker upstairs again.

Now a year older and wiser, we knew ahead of time that sanding around 800 square feet of floor space was gonna generate a lot of dust. So we taped off the doorways and put towels under doors to minimize the mess. There's no way to prevent the sawdust from going down the stairs, so we just... hoped. After sealing off everything as best we could, Kathy vacuumed up, as you can see.

I gotta say, 60-grit sandpaper under a 200-pound floor sander tears through rough patches pretty durn quick. It took off the worst of the adhesive goo real nice. Very encouraging. But after the first initial scrape, it starts to get boring and tedious. And it makes my hands go numb.

We did three rooms, and each room got sanded three times, each time with finer sandpaper. The sandpaper disks load up with dust pretty quickly, so you have to stop often and clean off or change the sandpaper. The weekend rental for the floor sander was about $75; we spent over $120 on sandpaper for it and filled an entire wastebasket with discarded discs.

But the end result was pretty nice: smooth floors stripped of any goo, gunk, glue, or residual stain. Now for the fun part.

Roof-Roof

The garage is coming along. We're on Week Four now, and the roofing materials were delivered and installed. We have a waterproof roof now, which is a good thing because it started raining a few days ago. Very unseasonable for May, but there you go.

The flat top is gone, replaced with a peaked roof. The overall idea is to match the style of the house, and we're pretty close. The main roof is steep: a 12/12 or 45-degree pitch. The city won't allow us to do that on the garage because it would violate some height ordinance or other, so it's 6/12, or half as steep. A steeper roof would have given us more storage underneath, but this is okay, too.


You can't see it from the pictures yet, but there's a lot of detail work going on inside the triangular gable area facing the street. That will ultimately get trimmed out to match the house, too, which requires a lot of molding and shingles and fussy bits. Then, a small window will get set into the gable, with a matching vent (but no window) on the opposite end for ventilation.


The old flat roof was recessed below the tops of the concrete walls; the new peaked roof sits on top of the walls. From inside the garage, the "ceiling" is about a foot higher than it used to be, and that's not even counting the peaked area. That also gives us more storage space (and headroom) inside the garage. Enough for a four-poster car lift...

But that's for another day.

Garage

It's ironic, really. The more we do to the house the less time we have to write about it.

It's been more than a month since our last installment, but that's not because we've slacked off. Just the opposite, actually. We're still working on the wood floors, finishing up the bathroom, we completely redocorated the master bedroom, worked on some details in the laundry room, and -- the big new project -- started remodeling the garage. Kathy's been busy with tax season and my racing season has just started. Never a dull moment.

You'll recall that the garage was, shall we say, butt ugly. Even the City of Pacific Grove agreed, granting us rare permission to demolish an historic structure, calling it "an eyesore" during the official public hearing. It hasn't been used as a garage in decades, acting instead as a storage shed for the most recent restaurant(s). It couldn't accommodate a car, much less two. There was a rotted man-door on one side and decrepit swing-out doors on the other that hadn't been opened in years. I replaced some of the rotted wood and put on new hinges a few months ago, which turned out to be a complete waste of time because we haven't opened the doors since.

We decided not to demolish the garage because we'd only be able to replace it with one exactly the same size. Even though it's undersized by modern standards (about 19x19 instead of 20x20), that's close enough for our two cars once we get proper doors on.

The really ugly part is the roof, however. It's flat-topped tar paper. The whole structure looks more like a concrete bomb shelter than a garage, and our neighbors (with one exception) seem thrilled we're redoing it. The plan is to put a peaked roof on top and two sets of swing-out carriage doors on the front. We'll cover the poured concrete exterior with wooden ship lap siding, just like the first floor of the house. When it's done, the garage should look more or less like it belongs to the house, and to the rest of the neighborhood.

Permits took several months, but demolition and construction finally started last week (late April). The flat roof came off in a few days, followed by framing of the new roof. Because we're removing the center concrete support from the front of the garage, it needs an engineered steel beam to reinforce the opening. That arrived yesterday and got installed under the watchful eye of an inspector. It's bolted, screwed, epoxied (and probably duct-taped) in place over the front opening where the doors will go.

From inside the garage, the "ceiling" is about a foot higher than it was before, because the new roof sits on top of the concrete walls instead of being set inside the walls. That will give us a bit more storage and headroom inside, but the real benefit will be overhead. The peaked roof will give us a few hundred cubic feet of much-needed storage.

The new peaked roof will cover only the front two-thirds of the garage. The back third will be flat, like a deck. That's because the garage is too close to the house to accommodate a peaked roof all the way around without interfering with the house's roof. It'll look normal from the street, and give us a small raised deck on the sunny side of the house. We're looking forward to it.