Remodeling: Finishing the Floor

The wood floor is basically done. We (or, I should say, Joel) will have to go back and put in some trim pieces and finish up the pantry floor but other than that we finished around 6pm today. Above are the pictures. Obviously I am too tired to clean--notice all the big black trash bags of construction debris and all the toys the girls have drug out. But I will post some more pics tomorrow of our new appliances and a cleaned up kitchen (for those of you tracking it, I haven't had a stove or dishwasher for 2 weeks and I haven't even had a microwave for the past 2 days).

Joel was wondering how many hours he had spent working. So, here is a breakdown of all of our work:

Jan. 17-20 we ripped out the floors. Joel worked about 17 hours and we had 2 workers for 7 hours each. I didn't help much on these days--I was too busy keeping the girls away from the splintered wood.

Jan. 25-27 Joel finished cleaning off the subfloor. And we started installing the new bamboo. Joel worked for about 18 hours and I helped about 9 hours.

Feb. 1-3 Joel and I both worked really hard this weekend installing the flooring. Joel worked about 26 hours and I helped about 20 hours.

If you add up all the man hours, that is 104 hours. We had an estimate on getting professionals to do the work. It would have cost about $6500 for labor alone. So basically we saved $65 for every hour put into the floor. Pretty good savings.

Following are some pics of Joel working.

Above, Joel is hammering a board in place. In front of him is the huge stapler that we used to attach the bamboo to the subfloor.

Above, is a picture of some of the tricky cutting that Joel had to do. See what professional work he did? I am so impressed! If you look close, there is a gap between the wall and flooring--this is to allow for the wood to expand and contract--the baseboards will hide this once we install new trim.

Above, is a picture of Joel carrying out one of my great problem solving schemes (we both came up with a lot of problem solving schemes). In the hall there had been carpet. Because of that, the molding around the doors went all the way down to the subfloor. But we needed the molding to have a gap to allow the bamboo to slide underneath. We didn't really want to remove all 4 affected door frames, trim down the wood, rehang the door frame, and then repaint it, but we couldn't figure out what to do. Finally I had the bright idea to dig out the Dremel tool and carve out the bottom of the frames. It worked great (it still took him about an hour to do all 4 door frames but it would have been a lot more work the original way).

All in all we are very happy that we took on this project. It was a lot of work and our house has been in chaos for 2 1/2 weeks but we really like saving over $6,000. And the floor looks fantastic--it really opens up the kitchen/dining area.