Haley got a bee in her bonnet about getting stuff done. And it’s a good thing too, because we went almost a whole week without any progress at all. Anyway, after a few phone calls and a few trips to our local Big-Box Home Store I had a very busy weekend planned for me. Here are the highlights:
Saturday– Subfloor! We will be installing VCT just like
this, so an absolutely smooth surface is required. Any teeny tiny imperfections will transfer through and since we have many imperfections, we went with 1 1/16″ thick tongue & groove plywood. It’s THICK and heavy, but the height should match up with the other finished floors, and with the number of ringed nails we used, I don’t think that floor is going anywhere for a long long time. It feels SOLID!
As many of you who have stopped by may have noticed, our home is NOT level… the back left side of the house has sunk a few inches. It’s not really noticeable with furniture in the room, but when it’s empty you feel like you’re
here, or maybe
here. Okay, it’s not THAT bad (if it was, we could charge admission!) but having some really heavy, not so flexible subflooring will sort of help everything even out. At least that’s my hope.
Our original flooring “guess-stimate” was $700. The first bid was for $7,500 with $4,500 of that going to subfloor installation! Huh?!! Another bid came in at a much more reasonable $1,500. Still eager to save, and considering I already have
subfloor experience, we decided to hire a couple of very able handymen, I would chip in where needed and we would just get it done. We wound up spending a whopping total of 5 hours and $600 on the subfloor. I still have to float a few areas to close up a few gaps and level out a transition or two, but it will be ready for the final floor to be installed on Monday.
Sunday– Sheetrock! And plenty of it. We had a bid of $1,500 to put in the sheetrock. That’s just kooky! I bought $100 worth of sheetrock, another $100 for tape, mud & screws and asked a couple of amigos to spend a Sunday getting it up on the walls. Between the three of us it’s up, and it looks great. Out handyman pal came in on Monday to handle the mud & tape duties and voila!… we saved a cool thousand dollars.
It’s a good thing we handled this ourselves, because when the time came to pull off the old water valves, we discovered they were very very corroded. The valves themselves were not too horrible, but the threaded metal thingies they were screwed on to were beyond saving. We had to heat the connection up, clamp on Vise-Grips and unscrew them by tapping with a hammer. The replacement ones I got are brass, so hopefully further corrosion won’t be a problem.
We haven’t decided on countertops yet. Formica is cheap, Coran is possibly barely affordable, and quartz is too expensive. (We forgot to include that on our initial estimate list… along with a new sink and water fixture… oops.)
Next… finishing sheetrock & paint/primer.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
