Progress...

The last few days have seen a few developments: the floor finishing crew has been here and given all the floor surfaces a thorough sanding and have now put down the first of three layers of polyurethane. The floors look great but the fumes are nearly unbearable, so consequently Nance and I are fully living back in the yurt for the week until the floor process is complete.

I installed the shower fixtures last Sunday before work on the floors began. They look great but we haven't had a chance to actually test the shower out yet since we were waiting for some caulk to dry. We'll get our chance this weekend once we can get back in the house.

I've been back at the cabinetry project and have put together most of the cabinet doors. Tomorrow I'll start building the drawers and drawer fronts.

Today I also made a run over the mountain for maple that we'll be using for the baseboard and door trim on the first floor.

Ready to finish floors

Jeremy setting nails last week

We've been busy preparing for the floor finishing crew that arrives tomorrow morning to sand and then polyurethane the pine floors we put down last week. The most time intensive aspect of getting ready has been setting the nails. It's just a lot of work and the kicker is that when the finishing guys showed up this morning to drop off some equipment they said we had to set them deeper then I thought we would, so we had to go back over it all this afternoon. Luckily for me Randy showed up to help out and made a long hard job manageable.

Otherwise, we are ready. I'll be back to working on the kitchen cabinets this week as access through the house will be pretty limited until the floors are done, which should be Thursday sometime. This means Nancy and I'll be living in the yurt again for the week.

Floors down

The pine floors installed. Notice also the woodstove is now set on the slate hearth. We'll get around to hooking it up soon. Oh yes, we also built a somewhat more expansive bottom step spilling out into the living space

Adam hard at work

The floor in process

Jake's tile work grouted and nearly done

Adam has been back up to help us out for the last two days and he and I managed to get the flooring down on the first floor. Due to some supply issues we went with 2" nails on the first floor instead of the 2 1/2" nails that Nancy and I used on the second floor. It was striking (no pun intended) how much easier the smaller nails were to nail in. Also, in a blessing from on high, the span of the main area of the living space on the first floor turns out to be just under sixteen feet wide and this allowed us to install our large stack of sixteen foot pine planking with no joints whatsoever on the first floor. I wish I could say I planned it, but I didn't -- it just worked out that way.

The next job for me is to set all the nails on both floors, which means hammering them with a tool called a nail set that submerges the nail heads roughly an eighth-inch below the finished the surface. This will make things good for next week when the floor sanding/finishing crew arrives to polish off the job.

Working alongside Adam and me today was Jake who is nearly done with the bathroom tiling project. The last remaining detail is to caulk the corner joints and then we are free to hook up the all the fixtures and call it a working bathroom. Maybe that'll happen this weekend?

Square Cut Nails

We are putting our pine floors down with square cut nails, which if you were to see them would probably look like what you think of as "old fashioned" nails. Cut nails were most commonly used from the seventeen-hundreds up through the early twentieth-century, and are made by shearing a small wedge from steel plate. This results in a nail that is parallel on two sides, and tapered on the other two. A head is then formed on the sheared nail and it is ready for use.

We're putting down wide plank pine floors and cut nails work well because there is a lot of width across each board to attach to the sub floor and using three cut nails each gives it a lot of hold. In the old days, this is how a floor would go down and you'd have the nail heads showing as a part of the process. We're pretty happy with the results.

Slate Work Continues

The facility that produced our slate

Eliza helping out with painting

Sealing the grouted floor

Grouting

We've been working steadily on the slate floor in the kichen/mudroom area. It's a large area and there are multiple passes that need to be made before we can call it complete, namely, laying the tile, cleaning it, sealing it, grouting it, cleaning it three more times, then sealing it two more times.

We've also laid the tile for the hearth under the woodstove and for entry area around the garden-end door. Tomorrow I'll seal and grout those as well.

We changed our plan a bit which required a trip down to Castleton, Vermont where Nance picked up more slate. While she was there she snapped a few pics at the Camara Slate work shed where they size and plane the slates. I would've enjoyed seeing this myself.

Also, my sister Eliza came over today to help us out. She did a bunch of painting upstairs and in the first floor bathroom. We are nearly all done with the painting.

Sealing the Slate

Nance applying the slate sealant

Something of a before-and-after view showing the effect of the sealant

The woodstove and the sawhorse table are approximating the actual location of our dining room table and the position of the stove

With a great day off to celebrate Christmas and enjoy some great time with family and friends (including a surprise visit from Joe), we were back at it today.

We spent a bunch of time cleaning up and working out the precise location of the woodstove and then worked on a pattern for the slate that will go underneath the stove. We also mapped out the slate plan for the west door entrance.

Our main hands on work today was sealing the slate with some mystical milk-like sealing stuff that needs to go on before we grout the floor. If we didn't seal the stone first, the grout would adhere to it and we'd be in deep trouble. This sealant will allow us to wipe the extra grout off the floor and leave it looking like it should.

It's been fun doing projects with Nance. Our need to be done is pressing and Joe is doing other things, so she's been spending even more time than she already was helping to get things done.

Wicked Long Day

Today Nancy and I spent laying down the slate floor in the kitchen. We weren't really going on it until around eleven, but once we got under way we worked hard up until around nine this evening. Covering the square footage takes time; mixing the mortar, troweling it out, confirming the tile placement to make sure it correct with the pattern, placing it, and then inserting the little 1/4" spacers that keep the tiles correctly aligned with each other and maintain a proper grout line.

As I mentioned earlier, the color is a lot more varied then we expected, but we both are quite pleased at how its looking. Its a mix of purple and gray slates with some really excellent little green splotches here and there.

We got our slate from Camara Slate in Fair Haven, Vermont. If you look at a map of the various slate colors and where they come from there is this swath that runs from Maine down through New England into Pennsylvania. The western southern-central part of Vermont is known for its slate and if you look at any of the older houses in that part of the state you'll more often then not see some 100 year-old slate roofs.

Tomorrow is Christmas eve and we might try to finish up, but we'll see how it goes.

Fall Colors

Nancy went at it today with painting. We are trying to stay ahead of the window trim installation, so she worked in the office first and then upstairs in the bedroom rolling on the color, and covered a lot of ground, or should I say wall.

Meanwhile I got to work on putting down the floor in the second floor bathroom. It took a little time mapping the layout so that when the floor is continued in the rest of the area around the bathroom it all finishes off like we want it to.