Adventures in DIY Flooring - Cutting the Rug IV

Me: After what seemed like constant setbacks & extra weeks of research and work, I finally got to start installing the planks!
The Imaginary Crowd: NO WAY!
Me: WAY!

Here are the first few rows... the second time I installed them. Ahem.

Friday afternoon, I did a few courses in both areas and quite when I came to where I'd need to do fancy cutting for door jambs.

On Saturday morning around 9:30, I made those tricky cuts done and kept going. Let me say that this stuff is a breeze to cut with the jigsaw fitted with a metal blade.

By around 4:00 on Saturday afternoon, I'd gotten the hall and over half of the guest room done! My feet, knees, and hips were hurting and I was starting to make cutting mistakes, so I called it a day.

Base moulding not yet reinstalled.

YAHOO! And HOT DAMN! And [celebratory, creative cussing]! As of Sunday, the floors are starting to be in. Like in-in. For reals in. I even got all the baseboards back in and then all the furniture in the guest room. In addition to all the additional construction-related expenses, I followed manufacturer best practice and added felt pads to all the feet. I'm not looking forward to the way lint and dog hair clings to those, but that's better than marring these hard-earned floors.

I am so glad I labeled the back of each piece of base moulding when I took it off, because it went back in pretty quickly. Hand nailing it was kind of a hassle, though.

This view makes the room look less colorful than it is, but we definitely need some more color now that there is all that wood tone- probably through some rugs.

New threshold-adjacent piece! I got a deal on a damaged oak threshold, ripped it down to suit, stained, etc.

It was Tuesday by the time I had the base moulding reinstalled and the furniture put back in the hallway. Due to a wow in one of the walls and a rookie mistake in another place, I added a base shoe to the base moulding in the hallway, so that added time for purchasing, finishing, and installing. Plus I kind of needed a break for sanity, comfort, and to work on some other things. With the staining, varnishing, cutting, and live-in-general this wasn't complete until the next Sunday.

The paint color in the hall is far from great, but man does it look worse in these photos!

When i was working in the hallway, I noticed that the cool bear tile that hangs above the guestroom door was in need of a bit of repair, so I took it down before it fell down. I need to get on that and get it back up!

Since the LVP is thinner than carpet + pad, the base mouldings are lower than they were before all this. And since we haven't yet repainted the hallway, I have no way to disguise the evidence of that on the walls, but giving them a scrub helped quite a bit. Anyway, repainting the hallway has moved up on the to-redo list, but of course that means other* projects associated with that have also moved up the list. However, those are probably winter projects.


I used pretty much exactly 14 boxes of planks to do these two rooms. I would say that there are less than two planks' worth of waste to date. That's quite a bit less than the expected waste of 6-10%! However, I am probably being way more attentive to that and moving much more slowly than professional installers on all counts, so it probably makes sense. Some of that waste is being put to use to temporarily hold things in place where the finished floors meet the as-yet-incomplete floors.



Next up: the master bedroom and closets. This whole self-leveling thing which adds a few hours of work and days of wait to the process is really going to mess with my intended schedule which had us able to sleep in there every night of the process. I guess we will not. So, this means that I am going to wait until I get back from a little trip and after MisCon is done. Eric will be on some panels and will be participating as a Pro in the MisCon Writers' Workshop. Also, his friend Tex will be staying with us so we'll do her the kindness of not having our king bed set up in the living room.

* It turns out that a house is a collection of cans-of-worms and working on the house is a series of opening those cans.

___________________________________________________

More unforeseen additional steps:

Adding felt to the feet of all the furniture.
Learning how to re-install bi-fold closet doors at a different height.