Kitchen make over - Post #4

The last post in my kitchen Reno series outlined some of the tear down and initial rebuild of the two outside walls.

In this post some of the exciting, well exciting for Claire, items start to happen. It is always a good sign when things start to be installed after spending weeks taking apart.

Today I will go over the starting and almost finishing of the hardwood floor.

As a quick summary the old floor was fully removed. This allowed me to fix a few things.

• The existing duct work was full of major leaks and in many parts not secured, I would guess that 30% of all the air was being wasted under the floor.
• The house being approx 20 years old obviously had many "holes" mice carcases and piles of dropping were very evident so a thorough clean up was required.
• Insulating the area to the outside under the floor, when this house was build they neglected to add proper insulation on the outside walls where the joists are, this is likely why we had so many mice. I used a mixture of Polystyrene, caulking and spray foam, also a little tip, for the larger holes I loosely filled with wire wool before spraying foam insulation, Mice apparently will not chew through this as the wire wool aggravates them.
• As we decided to go with a hardwood floor the existing 5/8ths floor needed to be beefed up to 3/4, so the floor needed to be changed anyway.
• Water pipes, the existing pipework was a tangled mess, there were far to many joints, 90's and generally far to much pipework! There had been some changes over the years so it allowed me to simplify it and add shut offs where required, I like to add shut offs, you never know when you need to isolate a line and fix a tap, adding shut offs makes life much easier for the future. Also the outside water tap, they way it was set up previously was hidden under the floor and when turned off shut off the cold water supply to the basement washroom.

The first image shows the area, with my helper as always!!, almost ready to start laying the floor, some important things before the sub-floor goes down: -

Check and double check, ohh and check again that all the electrical and plumbing is run to the correct location and labelled. Once the 8x4 sheets are laid they are not coming back up. To do this properly you need to glue and screw the sheets every 12" minimum.

I started my floor in the middle of the room, this according to every text book and Internet article is the wrong place to start, but I had my reasons. if I started from the left had wall I would have to some how match the exact starting point for when they joined where the short stud wall split the kitchen and dining room, I didn't want to risk having them out of line as there would have been a gap in the next few rows after the stud wall (I can explain better if any doesn't understand, let me know?). I couldn't start on the right side as the step wasn't anywhere near finished and I would have had to tear out the temporary kitchen you can just see in the third image on the right.

So I choose the middle, the only issue with this was that the two center rows would need to be back to back and consequently needed nailing on the back side of the pieces of wood and not through the tongues. I choose to also glue these two rows and not put the brown paper underneath. I felt comfortable taking this approach as this center row would be covered mostly by the island and dining table so the sight on nails wasn't an issue. And as mentioned in a previous post, hardwood floors become marked very quickly when you have kids and any sign of nails soon get lost!!!

One of the things about taking on these type of projects is tools, yes I had to buy many new tools. For the floor I needed a hardwood floor nailer, and you guessed it this was run by compressed air so I also had to buy a compressor, thankfully my garage has room :0)

One thing which never concerns me is purchasing tools, as a rule I always buy mid or high end tools. The better the quality the longer they last and "good quality" tools are generally easier to use, will last longer and more accurate. When time permits I will be writing a few articles reviewing some of the tools I purchased during the many renovations, I am really looking forward to that.

In the next post we start installing the cabinets!!

B...