Day Six: Paint touch-up, moving large and heavy objects, then DEMOLITION!!!
Today starts with an empty breakfast room (the zone with the brick pavers) and a great room full of very large, very heavy furniture, and has to end with a breakfast room full of large and heavy furniture and an empty great room. And something has to be done with the stack o’ hardwood along the way.
Start of the day: See yesterday’s pics.
Step 1) Move hardwood, again! Into the hallway this time.
Step 2) Touch up paint chips up by the ceiling where the masking tape pulled of some paint flakes. Not much to show here except the disappearance of small but annoying defects.
Step 3) Empty Great Room
I needed something to pad the bricks with so that the heavy stuff won't scratch them up. Since the carpet is destined for destruction, and it cut easily with a utility knife, I chopped small squares out of it and made furniture slides.
The tall, narrow end units of the entertainment center were easily moved with my hand truck. Remember what they say – “Chick dig guys with nice hand trucks.”
None of the big stuff slid on the carpet at all, but the piano moved easily enough one end at a time.
The real challenge was the big, honkin’ center section of that entertainment center, or TV Cave for short. If that thing were any bigger, it’s internal gravity would collapse it into a black hole. I could grunt a lot and move it just 5 or 6 inches at a time. So I went back and forth and inched it over to the bricks, then set it on the carpet scraps and nudged it off the carpet. Uff da!!! Some day I’m going to have to figure out a way to weigh this junk. In the meantime, I really don’t want to know… But I can say is that it is a LOT heavier than a Hammond B-3 organ.
Step 4) DEMOLITION TIME!!!
The carpet came up easily. The good ol’ Stanley utility knife chopped it into four convenient sections.
Today starts with an empty breakfast room (the zone with the brick pavers) and a great room full of very large, very heavy furniture, and has to end with a breakfast room full of large and heavy furniture and an empty great room. And something has to be done with the stack o’ hardwood along the way.
Start of the day: See yesterday’s pics.
Step 1) Move hardwood, again! Into the hallway this time.
Step 2) Touch up paint chips up by the ceiling where the masking tape pulled of some paint flakes. Not much to show here except the disappearance of small but annoying defects.
Step 3) Empty Great RoomI needed something to pad the bricks with so that the heavy stuff won't scratch them up. Since the carpet is destined for destruction, and it cut easily with a utility knife, I chopped small squares out of it and made furniture slides.
The tall, narrow end units of the entertainment center were easily moved with my hand truck. Remember what they say – “Chick dig guys with nice hand trucks.”
None of the big stuff slid on the carpet at all, but the piano moved easily enough one end at a time.
The real challenge was the big, honkin’ center section of that entertainment center, or TV Cave for short. If that thing were any bigger, it’s internal gravity would collapse it into a black hole. I could grunt a lot and move it just 5 or 6 inches at a time. So I went back and forth and inched it over to the bricks, then set it on the carpet scraps and nudged it off the carpet. Uff da!!! Some day I’m going to have to figure out a way to weigh this junk. In the meantime, I really don’t want to know… But I can say is that it is a LOT heavier than a Hammond B-3 organ.
Step 4) DEMOLITION TIME!!!
The carpet came up easily. The good ol’ Stanley utility knife chopped it into four convenient sections.
The pad underneath had some unusual color things happening, the explanation of which is still a bit of a mystery.
The color had faded very uniformly EXCEPT where there was a large object sitting for a long time. You can see colorful outlines of the piano, the TV Cave, and even where some small stereo speakers were placed. At first I thought it was plain old dirt. But it was too uniform.
The color had faded very uniformly EXCEPT where there was a large object sitting for a long time. You can see colorful outlines of the piano, the TV Cave, and even where some small stereo speakers were placed. At first I thought it was plain old dirt. But it was too uniform.
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Then I thought it could be a pressure thing, but the TV Cave really only makes contact with the floor around the edges. And there was no corresponding bright rectangle under the wardrobe that was in the opposite corner. And it is also bright under a strip of tape that held two rolls of padding together. Weird. But alas, it too was about to be destroyed, and perhaps the mystery with it. Out the padding came, and into the Rockvahn it went.
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The "tackless strips", those perversely misnamed wood strips with nails poking out of both sides that hold the carpet in place, had to be pried up nail by nail. And the nails were 6" apart, max. Lots of whack and pry, whack and pry. Knee pads were essential.
The Rockvahn ready for the trip to The Dump.
Today's tools of the trade:
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Some possible, umm, "issues":
1) At some point in time there was a big water spill. I suspect an evil plant. The subfloor was saturated for some time, and the fibers softened and expanded, leaving a high spot. Looks like I will be hacking out and replacing a section of the subfloor. Fun.
2) It looks like the brick pavers were laid on plywood surface that 's a bit thinner than the subflooring in the rest of the room. The builders left a small bit of plywood exposed, and laid the carpet right over it. No problem for carpet, but for hardwood, that thickness difference will have to be leveled out. Not sure exactly what to do there. I do NOT want to hack it out and put in a piece of subfloor, because that gets me into cantilever and bits-floating-in-space issues. Maybe I need to Google "bits-floating-in-space: how to negate".
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A couple bird's eye views of today's damages:
Those guys who built this house were real neatniks
Note the floating orbs in the photo below. Yes, they really are called "orbs". Some whackos think these are ghosts. They are really just out-of-focus dust bits reflecting the flash. These compact digital cameras are prone to this because the flash is so close to the lens. I learned this after cleaning the lens about, ahem, 50 times, thinking it was dirt or cheese or grease. Nothing helped. But a few minutes online set me straight. I just had to read around the paranormal crap-o-la to find the real answer. 
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