Scary Cabin

Schedules need to be flexible right? The original plan for the weekend was to start off grouting the bathroom floor. Then the toilet and vanity could be installed and we’d again have a working bathroom upstairs. And more importantly, the toilet and vanity would be out of the way when doing the flooring. Well, we manged to pick a grout from a manufacturer that Lowes doesn’t want to stock anymore. At least not the Lowes in our area. This particular grout is also not available via Amazon Prime. If there are no issues with the shipping, we should have it for the next trip up so a little schedule re-arranging was needed.

Instead of grout, we installed most of the laminate floor upstairs and moved things around so we could install the floor. But mostly the laminate kicked our butts this weekend. This is not our first time installing this stuff, we did the whole downstairs living area and downstairs bedroom with the same flooring. But this time it decided to bring it’s A game and really provided a challenge.

First, we thought it would look better if the planks flowed lengthwise through the small hallway between the bedrooms. To make this work, it means installing the floor in the front bedroom until it starts flowing down the hall. Then move to the back bed and install it until it aligns with the planks flowing through the hall. We measured it all out and surprisingly, it actually worked. Everything mostly aligned and we had a nice continuous flow of flooring between the bedrooms. The hallway presented a couple of challenges because of all the cuts to go around the door frames and because it was hard to support it while clicking and taping it together. But by the end of day 1 we had a couple of rows spanning the two bedrooms.

Day 2 is where things started to go wrong. We were almost done with the long runs through the hallway and one piece would not snap in. Usually, it it’s a bit stubborn, a couple of taps with the hammer will click it into place. Well not this time. Two pieces of flooring were destroying from hitting them too hard with the hammer without them clicking in to place. So something had to be wrong. Feeling underneath the board that was already in place, something didn’t feel right. Of course to remove that board meant removing almost all the boards in that row (i.e. the row that spans both bedrooms and hallway). And yes, something was wrong with that piece. There’s supposed to be grove that the next board clicks into, this piece had no grove. Once replaced with a good board, things snapped in place as they should, util we got a little farther and encountered the same thing again. So rip up the same row again and replace another board. I think we did that one row 3 times. We also noticed that a number of boards from that box were defective and started setting those aside. We finish the rows that span the hallway and move into the back bedroom and go until we’re blocked by the toilet sitting in the way (see above). Our next step is to clear out the other half of the front bedroom (the one we’re using as a work area with the saw and other misc. stuff) and start working on that. Well, what’s the first thing we encounter? We had used another of those defective boards at the start of the last row that spans the hallway. Now to pull everything part to get this one out would mean undoing all the work we just did in the back bedroom. We really, *really* didn’t want to do that. Since it was the end piece, there was just enough space to wiggle it out and get a new board in. After that, thins went pretty smooth until the boxes of remaining flooring were in the way. We’re about two rows from finished each bedroom so that should go pretty quick once we get everything out of the way.

We bought all the flooring in one large batch but it seems like we encountered a lot more “bad” boards while working on the upstairs. We had the defective, non-grooved boards, boards with scratches, one board with a bubble or finish blob, a couple of boards where the foam backing was not attached and many boards that have what appears to be melted foam backing stuck to the finished side of the plank. Our pile of “bad” boards is quite large.

The back bedroom had a couple of built-in drawer units that fit nicely in the eave area. We had kept these with the idea that maybe we could freshen up the face frame/drawer faces and re-use them. But then Genny said she wanted the built-in drawers to be wider than these. Since they’re made of particle board, there’s not really any way to widen them, I guess we won’t be using them. So the two custom built build in drawer units were disassembled and hauled down. In some ways, this is a bit sad as they were well made. Someone had put a bit of time and effort into making those.

Where are we now?
weekend n+0 - drywall prep (October 17/18th did some, not as much as planned)
weekend n+1 - finish drywall prep for texture (October 23/24/25 - texturing started)
weekend n+2 - texture & prime (October 31st / November 1st - prepping for texture)
weekend n+3 - paint & start bathroom floor tile & finish bathroom electrical (textured and prime)
weekend n+4 - finish bathroom tile & re-install vanity & toilet (paint, tile, and electrical finished)
weekend n+5 - install doors & start knee wall framing (November 21-22nd Installing laminate)
weekend n+6 - install laminate
weekend n+7 - finish laminate (baseboard & casing?)
weekend n+8 - knee wall work
weekend n+9 - knee wall work
weekend n+10 - knee wall work