Skeletons in the Closet, Part 1

In my case “skeletons” means some ugly shelves and water damage. Here’s what my bedroom closet originally looked like:

I basically just want to gut the whole closet so I can start from scratch with the new floors and figure out a better method of organization. Getting rid of the shelves was pretty easy. They were just attached to the walls with screws, so I unscrewed them and took them down. It was nice to not have to hammer away on a prybar for once. Well, for a few minutes at least. Next up was removing more baseboards and flooring.

I won’t bore you with more pictures of me prying away at the closet baseboards. I’ll just offer up some first-hand advice: always use a hammer to drive a prybar; using your hand will result in bruises.

The floor in the closet was just one big piece of plywood and was actually pretty hard to pry up. Another piece of advice: if you’re going to put down ugly flooring, don’t nail it to the concrete underneath and make it near impossible for the next person to remove. The nails that were embedded in the subfloor also tore up chunks of concrete when they popped out, so I’ll have to fill the dents before I put the new flooring down. THANKS PREVIOUS INSTALLERS.

The next job to tackle was getting rid of the water damaged sections of drywall. Here’s a closeup of what we’re dealing with:

If you watch home improvement shows, you’ll often see people using sledgehammers to knock down walls with reckless abandon. While it’s probably pretty fun, it’s usually not a good idea unless you’re absolutely sure about what’s inside the wall. The last thing you want is to bust a pipe open or knock out an electrical conduit. So I took the boring/careful route. The first thing I did was use my level to trace a rectangle around the damaged area. Next, I used my utility knife to score the lines I drew to give me a guide for sawing through the wall. You can use a jigsaw to cut out pieces of drywall as long as you’re careful not to go too deep (see above about pipes and wires), but remember, I don’t have that many tools. I should probably get some at some point. Anyway, I used a hacksaw blade:

Another pointer: use gloves if you’re going to be handling a saw blade like this. I’m just full of good advice today.

Here’s the hole that is now in my closet wall:

That honeycomb thing you’re seeing is called metal lath and it’s being used to hold the bathroom’s plaster walls in place. The black thing is the bottom of the bathtub. Since the bathroom is on the other side of this wall, I was worried there might be some leaky plumbing that was causing the water damage. But after opening it up it seems like everything is dry inside so it’s probably nothing too serious. I talked to an inspector and he suggested checking the grout and caulking in the tub for cracks or gaps in case there’s moisture getting into the wall that way – there’s no shame in talking to a professional if you’re not sure about something!

There’s another spot of water damage a little higher up on the wall that I’ll cut out next time. And hopefully I can get started on patching up the holes so that I can write about actually installing something instead of just tearing things out.

Floating Floors (not actually as cool as it sounds)

Disclaimer: in this post I’ll mainly be talking about floor construction and hardwood flooring installation methods. So unless you’re, like, really into floors, this post might end up being a little dry. Just putting that out there.

First, a little background info. A floor is typically made up of several layers; from bottom to top they are: the joists, the subfloor, the underlayment, and the surface. The joists are planks of wood, usually spaced 16″ apart, that are used to support the entire floor. The subfloor is either a layer of concrete poured on top of the joists, or sheets of plywood nailed to the joists. The subfloor provides a surface to build the rest of the floor on. The next layer up is the underlayment. The purpose of the underlayment is to neutralize any imperfections in the subfloor, so that the surface flooring has a flat and level base to lay on. Having a flat base for the surface is extremely important, as it has a huge impact on the floor’s stability and durability. A good floor is a flat floor, I always say (I don’t really, but it’s true). The material for the underlayment varies widely and depends on the type of flooring that is being installed – for a carpeted floor it’s foam padding, for a ceramic tile floor cement board is the norm, and the list goes on. And finally at the top, we have the surface of the floor. This is the only part of the floor you actually see and is whatever you’re walking on – hardwood, vinyl sheeting, carpet, sunshine, etc. Actually, not all floors will have all of these layers. For example a basement floor wouldn’t have joists if it were resting directly on the ground. Another example is the existing flooring in my condo; my floors don’t have an underlayment and are just pieces of hardwood glued directly to a concrete subfloor. There’s even a new trend of using stained concrete as flooring, in which case there wouldn’t be a need for the surface layer – the concrete subfloor itself would be the surface. CRAZY, RIGHT?!?

When it comes to hardwood flooring, there are two types of installations: nail- or glue-down and floating. A nail- or glue-down installation is exactly what it sounds like – the hardwood boards are either nailed or glued down to the layer below (either the underlayment or subfloor). A floating installation, unfortunately, is not what it sounds like. In a floating installation the hardwood floorboards sit on top of a foam underlayment, and aren’t actually attached to the layer beneath. No magnets or antigravity involved. BUT floating floors are super easy to install and are also easy to remove. So I guess that’s kinda cool.

Alright, now that all that’s out of the way we can get back to talking about me. I visited my local Lumber Liquidators to get some ideas of the type of flooring to install. I knew I wanted a darker color floor, but that’s about all I knew before going in. The sales rep I talked to recommended that I go with a floating installation because of all the glue left behind from my old flooring. The glue that’s stuck on the subfloor has tons of indentations and bumps that create a very uneven surface. But with a floating installation, I’ll have a pliable foam underlayment that can be rolled out on top of the subfloor, glue and all, to create a flat surface for the hardwood to rest on.

I narrowed it down to two choices for my floors:

The first one I saw was a handscraped burnished maple:

“Handscraped” means that it has a naturally worn and distressed look to it, which I wasn’t sure was a good thing or not. The next sample I liked was a stained strand bamboo:

I ended up picking the bamboo because I liked the darker color and the texture. Also, the bamboo flooring has a much higher hardness rating than the maple, which means it’s more durable and will resist denting better. I’ll save the hardness rating talk for another time; this post already has more than enough boring floor info. The next post will have more action, I promise!

All your Base(boards) are Belong to Us

Howdy. On today’s action-packed episode of Home Sweet Condo we will be (you guessed it!) removing baseboards, WOOOOO!!!!

The original baseboards are big and chunky, and hadn’t been installed that neatly. Here’s a picture of a joint between two baseboards at a wall corner:

Not too pretty. The baseboards should be cut and joined at a 45 degree angle at corners for a clean look. Baseboards joined this way also handle shrinking and expanding from changes in temperature or humidity better.

Since I was going to be getting rid of the original baseboards anyway, I left them up while I was removing the flooring to protect the wall at the bottom. If you’re planning on keeping your baseboards, you should carefully remove them from the walls before tearing up the floor so that you don’t damage them in the process. But mine suck, so they’ve gotta go.

I started by running a utility knife along the top of the baseboard to cut through the paint.

Cutting through the paint before prying off the baseboards will keep the paint from stripping off the wall. Next, I gently hammered a chisel in between the wall and the baseboard. But not too much! Just enough to fit a putty knife in there:

This is when I realized that the baseboards aren’t actually one piece. The flat part is just a plank of wood, and there’s a separate piece of moulding that runs along the top of the plank. This made me hate my baseboards even more.

I ran my putty knife between the wall and the moulding to separate the two. Then, I used a chisel to pry the molding off of the bottom plank of wood:

To remove the lower piece, I stuck a putty knife in between the wooden plank and the wall, and then wedged a prybar in between the putty knife and plank to pull the board off the wall:

The putty knife is to keep the prybar from punching a hole in the wall. So if you ever find yourself removing baseboards, make sure your prybar is resting against your putty knife and not the wall itself. I can attest that you will screw up your wall if you’re not careful about this.

So I made my way around the room pulling out the baseboards, and other than the one (minor) hole I punched in the wall it went pretty smoothly. There’s one corner where a coax cable is running through a hole drilled in the baseboard and into the adjoining room:

And I have no idea how it got through there because the end is too fat to fit through the hole so I couldn’t pull it out. I’ll just have to saw it out later (“later” = “after I get a saw”).

I still have to remove the baseboards and floor from inside the closet, but after that the floor demolition will be done! And maybe I’ll be able to move in by 2020.

Tearin’ up tha flo’

When we last left off I had started taking up the hardwood parquet tiles outside my bedroom. My plan was to continue making my way into the bedroom and clear out all the old tiles from there. I thought I’d be able to use my floor scraper to take up a bunch of the tiles at once, but it was too flimsy to get enough force behind it and pop up the tiles. Sooo that meant I had to get on my hands and knees and use a hammer and prybar. On this:

Yup, sounds like fun. Luckily I had gone and bought some knee pads beforehand. So now when I’m in my full getup (that also includes safety goggles, a dust mask, and gloves), I look like I’m about to become the unlikely protagonist in a first-person-shooter and take on some zombies.

The day was pretty much spent hammering my prybar under the tiles and ripping them up. I’ve read that removing the floor is the hardest part of a new installation, so hopefully things will speed up after this. After a while, I did uncover this creepy hole in the subfloor:

I was waiting for thousands of bugs (or ghosts) to start swarming out of there. I ended up finding another hole a few feet away and it looked like there were some old pipes underneath, so I think there used to be water lines running into the room. No word on whether or not they were haunted.

After a few hours I got just about all the old flooring up:

You can see that there’s a layer of glue left behind that’s pretty much covering the entire subfloor. I might have to rent a floor sander to get rid of it depending on the type of floor I decide to install. There were a few tiles left that were stuck underneath the baseboards, so I’ll have to remove those before I can get to the final remaining tiles. I decided to save it for next time. It got dark outside and no one was around to hear me scream if those ghost bugs decided to show up.

Let’s dive right in

I decided to work on the upstairs floor of my condo first since that’s where the bedroom will be. There’s work I want to do in pretty much every room in the place, but I figure I’ll at least need a bedroom to move in, so that’ll probably be the first room to be finished.

And the first project I’ll be working on is replacing the flooring. Here’s what my bedroom floor looks like right now:

YUP, that’s a cable coming in through the middle of the wall. We’ll get to that later. I pulled up a corner of the carpet to see what was underneath:

The carpet is  held down by tack strips that are nailed to a hardwood floor underneath, and there’s a layer of padding in between the hardwood and carpet. Removing the carpet wasn’t too bad. I used a utility knife to cut lines across the carpet as I pulled it up, and then I just rolled up the strips of carpet I had cut out. Here’s the bedroom after pulling up the carpet:

The padding was just stapled to the hardwood, so all I had to do was pull it up. I didn’t need to be too careful since I’ll be replacing the hardwood anyway. Aaand here’s what it looks like after removing the padding.

Those little white spots are pieces of padding stuck in the staples that are still in the floor. After I got rid of the carpet and padding, I used a prybar and hammer to get rid of the tack strips that went around the perimeter of the floor. The hardwood floor actually doesn’t look too bad here, but it doesn’t look as good close up. Plus if I didn’t take it up I wouldn’t have as much to blog about, so obviously it’s gotta go.

The parquet hardwood flooring is laid down throughout the upper floor, so I’ll have to take it all up. There were actually a few loose floorboards at the edge of the hallway and the bathroom, so I started there. After taking up the loose boards, I found out that the hardwood is glued directly to the cement subfloor (except the loose ones, I guess).

Here you can see the cement subfloor that’s underneath the hardwood, and it looks like the bathroom tiles are glued directly to another layer of cement. There was also a silverfish (probably not part of the installation). I got a long-handled floor scraper to take up the floorboards, but the walls made it a bit too tight to use it on this section of the floor. Instead, I just wedged the flat end of a prybar in between the wood and the subfloor, and hammered the other end to drive it underneath and take up the wood. This part took a while, but I was able to remove the wood from the section in front of the bathroom.

All that black stuff is the leftover glue that’s stuck to the cement subfloor. I might have to get rid of it before putting down the new floor, but I’ll figure that out later. I’ll work my way into the bedroom next, and I think I gave myself enough room to use the floor scraper so hopefully it’ll go a bit quicker.

Here’s all the carpet and padding I removed from the bedroom:

I probably should’ve cut the strips a bit narrower. Oh well, there’s a whole other floor of carpet to remove so I can do it next time!

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more floor scraping fun!

Hello world!

Hi people! Thanks for stopping by. I’ll be posting here about renovations I’m making to my condo. I’m planning on starting work on my condo soon, so I should have a post up in a little bit. In the meantime, I guess you can hang out here, but there are probably better things to do on the internet.