Anything I can do to help.

Looks like you are making good progress to having walls and floors again soon!

Thanks, that's on a project plan just like all the BS I have to deal with at work.

Recessed lighting is now complete and vents have been moved in line with kitchen lighting. This afternoon/evening's plans are to remove the arch from the doorway from the formal living room to the dining room, frame cove lighting and start joist strengthening the far part of the family room. These are only getting sistered and reset at the height they should be so I'm not expecting a lot of trouble over here.

Famous last words.

What did you work out with the cove lighting? I must have missed that.

I hear you... That would normally be a dangerous thing to say but these joists I inspected closely from below a couple of weeks ago and they are free from brown rot.

I'm only doing cove lighting between the family room and kitchen. Elsewhere it didn't quite look right. For framing I'm going to try a 2x4 at 8' high that's drywalled only halfway on top to hide the LED strip. That should be a good size for it.

[This message has been edited by the fife (edited 3/11/2014 7:54p).]

2 out of 3 isn't bad. The arched doorway is no more and framing for the cove lighting is in. Tomorrow is large item pickup day so I hauled demo debris out to the street for about an hour. Tomorrow I buy all the LED strip stuff and get moving on the last area for joist work. It's also warming up over here and the HVAC dehumidifier has been earning its keep. I seriously like this thing.

We're also tentative for Mon/Tues with the drywallers. It was too much trouble trying to line up others to come by and I doubt the price will be more than. $500 different so we're going with the known quantity here.

The FIL will be in the area two weekends from now for work (surprise!) so ideally drywall will be in and we'll be however far along with paint by then.

Joist rework is every bit as fun as I remember it being. It's not quite as bad at the far end of the room because the wood is not rotten and it's pretty straight. I made it to the part where the exterior wall bumps out 4 feet. These last 5 will be rehung one side at a time and sistered in place instead of being removed completely and put back in. If I'm lucky I'll have these done by noon tomorrow, get some plywood in and then make a doorway for where the half bath will be.

The rest of the ready for drywall punchlist is...
- Delete 2 recessed lights in breakfast area
- phone line drop in the pantry
- low voltage wire run for cove lighting
- Run pendant lighting wiring
- Plumb sink drain
- Low voltage wiring for the peninsula side of the kitchen

The joist and subfloor BS is finally done. I just finished it and wrapped up vacuuming. It wasn't as bad as the other areas, just time consuming. There's the joists, blocking, shimming up the beam I ran under the floor a year or two, fastening hurricane straps I added, then subfloor... Buckets of fun. The big ugly item on the list is gone at least and there will be no more tearing anything up for the rest of the project. It's all building from here on out.

Drywall is up. I would normally be pretty happy about it except they put some up on half of the ceiling where I am doing paneling instead. In the process they gouged up six LED fixtures. I'll be asking for about $280 off now...

BTW, way to cut *around* the trim ring... even if we had a drywall ceiling here it still wouldn't work.

Just how STUPID can they be!!!

Even silly women know the trim ring comes off!

The trim ring is permanently attached to the bulb, they are Cree CR4s. But the bulb screws in to the recessed can housing just like any other light bulb.

I'm more mellow now... The rubber fitting between the PVC drain and original copper line tested good. There are only four short things to do before the mud/tape crew comes so I have to move on to that. I also need to think about the shade of white we will go with on the walls and I'm always looking for an excuse to get on houzz for a long time...

Wow, that sucks about the fixtures. Hopefully you didn't pay up front.

The drywall is finished and I started painting yesterday. Finished is an approximation - there are a couple of really small things that were overlooked but none of it is really a big deal. I found small imperfections that needed attention anyway when I sanded the walls. No official word on the bulbs - the invoice hit my inbox yesterday and I replied with the picture of the two lights and that I expect to have the amount reduced by the cost to replace the damaged ones.

So far I've been through maybe a gallon of primer. The spout sold by Lowes for the 5 gallon buckets works pretty well to help control everything while you pour paint into the roller tray. Today I'm hoping to wrap up the rest of the wall touch up/sanding, priming and if I'm lucky maybe paint the ceiling in the kitchen so I can put the lights back in. I'm also picking up some white quartz samples on my way home to help us pick out the final shade of white. I'm shooting for finishing all the paint before the end of the weekend and having the first row of flooring in by Sunday evening.

Everything still looks pretty much like a construction zone. It'll probably stay that way until the flooring is finished and I can put the family room back together.



[This message has been edited by the fife (edited 4/2/2014 5:16a).]

Looking good

I don't know if you've noticed, but you're missing your ceiling sheathing...

Love the doggie door in the middle of the pic...but that's a big un! Gotta be one wide dog!

Lol yeah, it's the doorway to a future half bath. The house bumps out 5 feet around there. I'm basically turning the toilet 180 from where it is now and the rest of the half bath will be a water closet.

We went with spray foam after all. I talked to a couple of friends who are custom builders and renovators and they both said that unvented cathedral ceilings with spray foam insulation were the only kind they never find mold in, for whatever reason. Drywall isn't required because of the foam and the consensus was that the planks will be OK installed directly (I have to go about 1/2" or thicker though).

Ceilings are painted but I'm still working on the walls. It's going ok but I keep running into little spots where drywall needs just a tiny touchup here or there. Things would probably be going a lot faster if I didn't work 7 days a week but my arms are sore enough as it is.

Appliance order part 1 is in for the warming drawer, dishwasher, vent hood and microwave drawer. I'll be walking funny for a while. Part 2 will be the wall oven and part 3 will be the steam oven and cooktop.

edit: BTW the door between the den and garage has a medium sized dog door. We found out the wife fits through it just fine when she locked herself out.

[This message has been edited by the fife (edited 4/7/2014 12:13p).]

Don't mind me, just installing mah flooring.

You're not done yet?

If you keep up this pace, how will you watch TV in your kitchen? I was thinking that would be the next wave of improvements across the US; no stove in the kitchen, just a TV!

~egon

Yeah, I think the little brown bottles next to the TV may have something to do with the slowness of this job! lol

Even better, they're bombers. Rogue Espresso Stout and Epic Armageddon IPA.

Besides working every day in April except for Easter, two things have been screwing me up with the flooring. I've had to play the 1st row game 3 times now, each time the area to be floored gets wider. Also I've only installed prefinished and engineered hardwood. This is unfinished and as tight as I could get it a couple of times there was a tiny gap between rows, up to about 0.016" and I wasted a bunch of time online figuring out whether that's normal or not. It is, they're filled during finishing. The short pieces are 40-50" long and the big ones are 125+" so they can be a little hard to handle.

The TV leaves the room today. Not looking forward to it; that and the entertainment center weigh a ton. T&P for my back.

The kitchen is done, now I'm building into the family room. On a good evening I can get over 10 rows in. I'm trying to recruit a helper so she can help speed things up. With any luck I'll finish this part of the project by next weekend. It's nice because as I built into the family room all the tools and scraps that are no longer needed are going away, so the area is also getting cleaned up.

The first 1/3 of the appliances have arrived (D/W, vent, microwave drawer) and they're stashed someplace safe for the time being. The hood weighs a ton so that will be a fun one to install.

Dat's what I'm talmbout.

Is finishing scheduled before the cabinets or are they going to finish around them?

Finishing happens before cabinets go in. It's easier and safer that way.

how are you finishing up that half wall?

It'll be a peninsula. Cabinets and a microwave drawer on the kitchen side, waterfall countertop at the end. On the family room/breakfast area side there will be 24" cabinets on the left/right and seating in the middle. We'll need to buy 3 or 4 stools once things are more put together.

MOAR pictures. Widthwise, I'm about 40% of the way through the family room. It gets about 10' narrower at the far end of the room so it'll go a little faster over there. Today's goal is to get to that point, and anything beyond that is just a bonus. I'll need to remove about 3' of flooring from the master bedroom so there won't be an obvious transition from one room to the next but that isn't a big deal.

Picked a finish yet?

How rough is that wood? I've never installed a product that wasn't pre-finished except for some black walnut that only needed a light sanding and oil.

We're still deciding... The first picture is brighter than one idea we have but you can get the idea.


I'll probably take a couple of pictures and ask my aunt who is a designer (open to suggestions though). This is the other idea but I need to see how it would work out with the walnut cabinet finish sample we selected. I'm afraid of the kitchen having too much yellow between the walnut and flooring, or the family room being too white if we go too far the other way.


The black marks are from rollers the pieces traveled on at the mill but the wood is pretty smooth as-is. It's fine to walk around barefoot. There are slight (<1mm) differences in thickness and the there are sometimes tiny variations in overall width from 0 to 1/32". Sanding will make it completely flat and whatever gaps there are will be filled at that time. With prefinished wood the bevel will take up whatever thickness or subfloor variation there may be, and probably breaks up any tiny gaps so they aren't noticeable.