Day 331: Kitchen Underway

Our kitchen is underway! Last Monday, a Budget rental truck with two guys wearing Best Buy shirts showed up and unloaded about 300 boxes of various sizes from Ikea. I guess that's what you call team work.

Mandy started the assembly. Krista and Kim helped as well, so that when I got home, we could start hanging them.

The cabinets hang on metal rails screwed into the walls. I used my handy dandy laser level to ensure that all of the rails were, well, level.

I had some good help putting the cabinets together. After hanging the cabinets on the wall, I screwed the faces of them together so that they would be perfectly flush.

We installed the cabinets around the fridge and almost all of the other cabinets. We ended up being five base cabinets short, due to a mis-delivery by Ikea/Budget/Best Buy. The missing bases showed up a week later, and are now installed.

Nate came over and helped lay out the island. 

Day 346: Finished Floors

Tuesday

After much work, we can finally put a stake in the ground and call our hardwood floors done! We stained them and added the first coat of polyurethane. After it dried, we noticed a lot of little bumps and bubbles from dust that had settled into the drying poly. We rented a floor buffer and picked up some screening disks.

The buffer and screening disks ended up working wonders. Took off the rough spots and prepped the floor for the second coat of poly. It also gave the floor a nice worn look by taking the stain of the high edges of a few areas.  We'll post some more pics of the finished floor soon.

Day 342: Hardwood Floors

Hey there. Thanks for checking in. We're still in the process of finishing up. For the last couple months I've been saying "we'll be done in about a month." At this point we're looking at finishing up sometime in April, i.e., in about a month.

We've just about wrapped up the hardwood floors. We have about 1,600 sq ft of hardwood on the main level, along with the stairs and two landings. We opted to install it ourselves, going with red oak as our choice of material. Rustic has been our theme, so we went with mixed widths, combining four widths: 2 1/2, 3 1/2, 4, and 5 inch boards in a random distribution.

To start the installation, we scrapped up all of the excess drywall mud that had dropped on the floor. The floor needed to be as smooth as possible, as any bumps or defects would translate through the floor.

After cleaning the floor, we installed an asphalt paper as an underlayment. The underlayment helps act as a moisture barrier, as well as provides a smooth sliding surface to help the floor boards move during installation.

The hardwood had been inside for about four weeks acclimatizing to the temperature and humidity of the house. We then used a floor nailer to nail through the tongues and into the subfloor. I picked one up on Amazon for about $100. Matt and Steve helped set up the process, and which we were able to install the floor over a two week period.  

Since we had red oak floors, we wanted red oak stairs as well. I purchased some rough cut 5/4" boards about 11" wide, and cut them to fit as treads. I sanded them smooth, which took off any splinters but left the character of the rough cut. Extra flooring was used for the risers.

After all the flooring was installed, Mandy filled in any big gaps using a professional putty that I ordered from Chicago. It was mainly used to fill knot holes and end gaps.

Next up: staining and finishing the floors. I also need to catch you up on the stair rail installation and front yard drainage.