You can’t go!!! All of the plants are going to die…

Wait, I don’t have any plants… Ok, as I’m sitting here writing, I have the movie Stripes (1981) starring Bill Murray and Harold Ramis (Movie link)  playing in the background. The opening scene has Bill Murray’s girlfriends walking out on him. The scene is pretty funny especially when he says, “You can’t go!!! All of the plants are going to die...” I guess in a way I feel the same way with the tenant upstairs… After about two years of occupying the apartment upstairs, she officially gave her 30 day notice (It's Official). I do have to say the experience thus far has been pretty good. I certainly have no complaints. In reality, I should never expect anyone to stay in that apartment forever.

I will be attempting to have the apartment ready by April 1. I have a couple of things that I want to accomplish upstairs before I rent it out. But that won’t happen for a couple more weeks from now. So until then, lets focus on the first floor.

Yes, I’m still working on the hallway floor. I began my work on removing the corkboard flooring. Yes, the wonderful Search and Rescue crowbar was once again my weapon of choice. As I was chiseling the corkboard flooring away, I discovered a black paper that I think was a poor attempt to level the floor.

As you can see from the photo above, the door was wide open. After so many days of being below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it was finally above 40 degrees… It was really nice outside, but I was working inside…of course….

However, later in the day after experiencing a beautiful sunny day, the snow decided to give us a visit, once again…

I guess I should focus… So after removing the rubbish, I started to install the 3/4 inch plywood. I had to shim plywood between the back door and bathroom. It would appear at one time there was a cast iron radiator and the weight of it had sunk part of the floor.

I had to cut the plywood to fit around the baseboard radiator.

As I was crawling around the floor, I had felt a cold blast of air coming from the floor by the door. So, I decided to fill the crack with an expandable sealing weather foam.

After filling in the cracks with the expandable seal weather foam, I was then able to install the new flooring. The plan was to install the same peal and stick flooring that was used in the kitchen and bathroom. However,I decided to wait until the following morning. It was pretty late and I was pretty tired from all of the work thus far…

So the following morning, I awoke to find that the expanding weather seal foam had preformed as designed… However, I think I over did it… 

Prior to installing the new floor, I had to cut the excess foam back. But I was even more shocked when I found the expandable weather seal foam can. Apparently the can shutoff had malfunctioned, thus, here was the results.. OOPS!!!

Once my foaming issue was taken care of, I was able to finally install the peal and stick flooring.

Here is the result… I’m so excited that this project is finally complete. It’s now time to move onto another project. But, I won’t worry about that now. Until next time, happy building…

The crowbar that rescued me…

The 2011 winter season thus far has certainly been an interesting one. Recently mother nature poured enough snow on our wonderful Massachusetts state that I think it will be well after May before it’s gone… On one day, mother nature poured about 2 feet of snow. Since that day, the snow has continued to fall. The snow has been piling up and I really don’t know where it’s all going to go… Well that is a silly statement, we all know it’s going to eventually melt… But if it snows again, it’s going to be extremely difficult to enjoy summer…

I have to admit, beside having to snow blow the driveway every other day, I can finally have time to finish the apartment. I’ve been working on this house for a long time and I still have a lot that needs to be done. I have one final major renovation that needs to be completed. A lot of the things that still need to be done to the apartment are small. But this one project could not hold out any longer. The lovely hallway floor… I started this little project back in December 2009 (So much to do...). Yes it has been awhile… But it’s time to push this bad boy to the top of the list..

For the last year I’ve been living with the floor looking like this. I had started to remove this portion of the floor, but it was extremely difficult at the time, so I decided to change projects… Well later is now…

This pictures shows a good reason for my problem. The floor has two layers of Linoleum floor and a concrete backing…Actually, the concrete backing is a floor level that cures like concrete… The entire floor was covered with this stuff. The flooring level was more of a headache then doing any good.

I had to peel the top layer of the linoleum like an orange. I have to admit, removing the floor layer was extremely exhausting. It took me about 2 days to remove the rind like surface. Two days later, here I am…The first layer of the floor completed.

The next step was a little more difficult to complete then removing the linoleum flooring. Once I removed the top layer linoleum flooring, I discovered two layers of Luan plywood that were .25 inch thick. This could explain why the floor had an excessive amount of drywall screws and floor level compound…

Initially, I was going to use an adhesive remover to get access to the drywall screws. Basically, I was going to remove the rind like surface and then unscrew the Luan Plywood off… But I realized that it would take me even longer… So enter the Search and Rescue Crowbar…

The search and rescue crowbar was my tool of choice when removing the Luan Flooring… As you can see, underneath the Luan flooring was the wonderful corkboard plywood…

As you can see from the picture above, the corkboard absorbs any liquids that falls on it. You can also note the drywall screws used to secure the Luan Plywood in the top picture

I finally removed the crappy flooring… Next on the list is to remove the corkboard flooring and replace it with 1/2 –3/4 inch plywood. After that, I’m going with the peel and stick flooring… Anyway, until next time happy building…