Upstairs Floors Post 2: Dragging my feet is my favorite pastime

Bad news, I don’t have anything to show you. I’ve been taking it easy, but also pondering. Because I need lots of time to do that every time I take on something complicated. So if you want visuals, you can watch what I’m watching. Note: there are a lot of videos just like this. I’ve watched more than one and gotten no benefit from the repeats.

In a nutshell, I have to make these ugly square holes in my floor not square by removing extra sections of boards at random lengths.

I need to make cuts lengthwise through the boards and cut the ends cleanly with a wood chisel. Then I’ll have to cut the tongue-and-groove shape out of the wood (if it didn’t already get damaged when I pulled it up) so I can get the boards in one at a time. And the original floors had no subfloor. I’ll add plywood subflooring in between the joists and glue it in place so everything is solid.

One little problem. The farthest board to the left is the widest in my house. There’s only one board I can cut from to get the patch, and it’s short and badly damaged. Then I have another piece that has about a foot of usable wood. So most floorboards are really long. Like, they run under the walls through multiple rooms. But back there (in a corner behind a radiator) there will be several short boards pieced together. At least the wood will match. Everywhere else I’ll make the patches as long as they need to be to look good.

Then in the back bedroom, I’m gonna be way to cheap to pay $7 a square foot for flooring in the closet (I already don’t have enough for the room) so I’ll run one board the opposite way as a threshold in the doorway. If there are enough scraps left over I can do the closet. Otherwise, wall to wall carpeting scraps that my dad hoarded are the answer. I’ll use short and damaged pieces in there; who cares?

The flooring is random width, but it looks like I mostly just have a couple widths. So I’m going to start at whichever end of the room is the longest and start matching up boards to run the length of the room (and make a random staggered pattern of board ends). I’ll have to cut up what I have and piece it back together to take the bad spots out and make it long enough for the room. And once they’re all kinda laid out, then I can go to the salvage yard, buy more, and keep going. The salvaged wood looks like a perfect match, but I want to mix it in randomly.

So yeah, that’s the plan. I’ll start it soon, even though being unproductive has been fun.