Floor prep one

Hello all. With the carpet gone and much of the ceiling and wall painting out of the way we could begin installing floors throughout the Cottage. In keeping with the lakeside vibe, we decided on unfinished, 3.25-inch yellow pine boards. Sixteen hundred square feet of it, enough to cover every surface that won't be tiled.

We opted to buy this in 16-foot-long boards, which look great but are a bit of a struggle to maneuver especially upstairs. Our plan was to start with one of the bedrooms to work out any kinks in our approach, but that meant cutting a bunch of boards roughly in half to make it up the stairs. It wasn't hard work once you have a straight edge, but it was a mite tedious. Once we could use the miter saw things went a bit quicker.

By the end we had a nice stack of enough wood to cover the room that we could bring into the house to acclimate to the temperature and humidity inside.

Another part of the preparation has been acquiring and practicing with some new tools. We had planned to use a manual floor nailer because we have experience with that. The more we thought about it the more we realized that would be a LOT of hammering, so we researched using a pneumatic nail gun and done properly there was no reason it wouldn't work.

We had some spare oak floorboards, which are much harder yellow pine, and put theory to the test. We were encouraged enough by the results to continue down this path.

We also wanted a faster way to do all the three rounds of sanding--one after installation and one each between the three coats of sealer. When doing one room and with no other projects going on it's very possible to use palm sanders with a 5-inch diameter. It's not fast, but it works. With a whole house to do this could have pushed things into 2023. Far beyond our goal.

Typically in this situation we would rent a floor sander (drum or disc). That was an option, but we will be doing a room or two at a time, which meant we'd be renting the machine multiple times. Ok but not ideal. Instead we found something called a drywall sander, apparently made for people who want their walls and ceilings super smooth (e.g. to remove "popcorn" ceilings). There seemed to be no reason why we couldn't use it on a floor. The formula for calculating area of a circle means that the 9-inch diameter sanding disc is more than 3 times as large as the 5-inch hand sander. Thank you math!

One thing that's been enjoyable about this entire project has been getting to honor family members and continuing a chain that goes back at least two generations. For some of our sawing needs we've used this throwback to the Mercury Program from one of our grandfathers and this hammer from one of our fathers. We think they'd approve.

Until next time.