Drumroll please… a big milestone this week!
My plumber’s been in! That’s right, I have a working bathroom!
Now it’s not all good news. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to tile all the way up to the valve, so my plumber got to have fun chipping out my work to make the trim piece fit. And he couldn’t make the one I wanted fit, so he swapped it for a more basic one. Honestly, no big deal. I like my shower head, although he also said he had trouble installing it and it was leaking like crazy. But still, it’s done!
And I think the only proper way to celebrate is to take a duckface selfie in the bathroom mirror.
And a few more details about the room as it currently looks. In my imagination, the mess will go away eventually. The sink, mirror, and shower curtain are also temporary; I bought the cheapest rod possible because (at Aldi of all places) I loathe tension rods. The rings with rollers are nice, but the joint in the rod defeats their purpose.
And on the flooring front, I’ve been held up again. The plan was to buy the very small amount of extra flooring that I need on Friday and get it installed this weekend. But there was no one working at the warehouse where Philadelphia Salvage has it (I bought everything they had in the store that matched mine). Then today I found myself with an air compressor but no nailer. I’m going to take half a day on Monday to try to get all this behind me and start Sheetrocking the second floor. This kinda needs to happen fast because I want the patio door in before winter (It should arrive around the end of the month) and I want to take all my stuff upstairs before the brick wall on the back of my house gets torn out.
Plus, having walls throughout the second floor will be amazing.
So, unequipped to do the work I wanted to do, I spent today in search and destroy mode with creaks in the front bedroom. Some of them were so bad I could actually feel the boards vibrate when I stepped on them. Now, the floor is stiff and virtually silent, and all the scraps of plywood from everywhere else in the house are put to good use!
Just like the other pieces that I needed to hold the floors together, these are put up with lots of Liquid Nails and short screws.
A friend and I started going around for the worst creaks in the room, and kept going after smaller and smaller creaks with smaller and smaller scraps of plywood. I’m really, really happy with how this turned out. The upstairs hall still needs some help, but that can wait till after the Sheetrocking is done. For now, the oak strip flooring is protecting the awesome pine underneath. I’ll deal with it all later; Sheetrocking the living room ceiling is on my mind, but not quite on the schedule yet. I’ll leave you with a shot of the transition from oak to pine that came with the house. It’ll be way nicer to have the same floors throughout the upstairs (although I do have a threshold into the back bedroom) and having the floors run the length of the upstairs hall. The way they are now, running across its 26 inch width, looks a little weird. Not that weird is a bad thing.
Oh and one more thing. I ended up with a lot of short pieces of pine flooring that don’t match the widths of any of the longer floorboards I have left. This is annoying because it means buying more flooring to finish the room, but it’s good because it resolves my question about the closet floor. It will be the same pine as everywhere else.
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Congratulations on your shower, Chad!
I must say, though, that I don’t understand your approach to the upstairs floors. If there wasn’t a subfloor, I would have pulled up all the boards, salvaged as many as I could, and laid a subfloor down. Then I would have relaid the floor. This reinforcing from underneath seems way too complicated. But I’m glad you are satisfied with the results.
M.E.
Oh taking the floors up would have been days and days of work, and more reclaimed flooring from the salvage yard, which isn’t cheap. I got it all reinforced in a couple of hours. Also, these floors run under the walls. Remember, a few original walls didn’t come out!
Also, it would have meant buying a lot more subfloor. This was really easy because I did it mostly with scraps! We had to make very few cuts.
I hope you are experienced enough to be absolutely sure that your solution is fail safe or that you are checking with someone to verify your solution is sufficient to support people and heavy furniture. Just concerned for your safety. On the sunny side your work in your shower looks flawless and very attractive. I can’t wait to see your next point of completion. Its what always kept us going in fixing our homes=the satisfaction of 0ne job done and only far too many to go. Kudos to you Chad-it looks great!
The floors themselves are adequate to hold furniture. These added boards are to stop creaking. It’s very common for houses like mine to have a heart pine floor installed with no subfloor. So stopping the creaking, basically a cosmetic thing, is just extra. In the patched areas where the plywood might actually have some weight on it, I plan on adding some more supports under it. And remember, the smaller and more rigged looking the patch, the more minor the creak.
One thing you know for sure is that your flooring has held up for decades (a century) so I wouldn’t expect it to all of a sudden become too flimsy to hold people and furniture. My house, built in the forties, has a fabulous diagonal subfloor with oak in the downstairs and pine in the upstairs. We’re not sorry we kept it.
Your bathroom is coming right along. Thanks for the tip about tiling up to the shower valve. Jo @ Let’s Face the Music
Yeah. Like I said, I want to add a little more reinforcement under the patched areas. I’ve jumped up and down on them and they felt great, but if Liquid Nails ever breaks down, there should be a little bit of reinforcement underneath. The rest of these look like a hack job, but they’re only there for creaking.
Looks great! I was just contemplating squeak-reducing techniques on my pine subfloor-floors!
There are special screws for doing this. The thread spacing changes so they grab and pull the floors down and then when you drive them in the heads pop off! But if you’re unlucky enough to tear out the ceilings below those floors, Liquid Nails and plywood scraps (or custom cut) works amazingly.