Son helped me prepare my office for a wood floor on Saturday. It used to have the same pinkish carpet the covers the rest of the house and I decided it needed a change.
Good Friends with Soccer Daughter gave me around 10 packs of hardwood tiles that they had for a couple of years and didn't use and offered them to me for free. Free is a relative term when it comes to the total cost of a project.
I had to remove 80-odd bottles of wine from a rack before we could move it to another room. All of my office furniture followed after that and now fills my dining and living room areas. Pulling up the old carpet and the padding underneath was the easiest part of the day. Pulling up all the carpet tack and staples was the hardest.
There had obviously been multiple types of carpets in that room over the years. The last owners decided to put down new carpet tacks but left the old strips in place. They also left all the staples in the floor from the previous installation. Son and I spent the better part of the afternoon removing all the strips and staples by hand.
I went to the home improvement store and bought some more tiles, just in case, molding, four gallons of adhesive, a compound miter saw, and a table to hold it. The dimensions of the room meant that eleven of the tiles would have to be cut to fit and I wasn't going to do it by hand.
Beautiful Wife helped me by handing me the tiles and I installed them all by hand after spreading the adhesive on the floor. This is also the first project that I ever did using a chalk line in order to snap a line to make sure it all went in straight. In fact, I snapped two lines and then checked the resulting angle to make sure the whole job would be square.
There are some spaces in the floor because the tiles aren't perfect, but they are tiny and will be filled with filler this evening. I also have to cut the molding (another job not being done by hand but using the miter saw instead) and install that tonight too. I'm going to buy some mineral spirits to remove the adhesive that got on some of the tiles and then it will be ready for the office furniture to be returned.
I had knee pads but my knees are still killing me after hours of being on them as I spread the adhesive and laid the tiles. If I ever decide to do another floor I'm going to do the kind that doesn't require adhesive instead.
Posted by bbarton at July 11, 2005 09:45 AM