Finishing off the bedroom flooring
Managed to get straight from a physio appointment to Travis Perkins on Friday after work. I’d been given a bunch of exercises to do by my phsiotherapist to straighten out a running inspired ankle injury and I figured a bit of timber lugging would be a suitable additional workout before I started on the main job of finishing off the bedroom flooring.
As I mentioned in my previous post my flooring adventures had come to a juddering halt when I’d ran out of chipboard flooring and hence I now needed to stock up on a couple of sheets to finish off the job. The chipboard I’d used had been previously delivered by Travis Perkins but this time I was taking a chance that it would fit in my nice new car. The night before this I’d removed the baby seat, taken out the stacks of rough weather gear and a quick tape-ruling had indicated that the sheets might just fit in the car as long as they breathed in.
At Travis Perkins after a bit of wandering around I managed to get a gentleman to cater to my tongue and groove needs and finding what I needed he quickly slid two sheets off the rack onto the floor and lifted one end. I looked at him in slight awe – I can only just manhandle one at a time, this man had two – he looked back at me and I quickly realised he wasn’t about to lift them onto his shoulder but was inviting me to pick up the other end. Thank goodness for that, I felt a bit threatened in the manhood area for a moment.
Anyway we carried them over to my car and slid them into the chasm I’d created by flattening out my seats and with a bit of jiggling they just about managed to fit in, however there was a still a bit of noticeable overhang where the door would slam. The assistant said that I was to close the door as yesterday a customer had lost a car window in a similar venture, so crossing my fingers I gingerly closed the door, it didn’t close entirely, a bit of adjusting, a couple more attempts and the door closed. It was all a bit tight though and I did worry for my nice new shiny car interior, it had fitted but it did have to breathe in a bit though.
Anyway I stocked up on some caulk, some screws and rawlplugs and headed off home. Cornering proved very interesting, my gearstick was already under the boards but cornering made the board slide across further over the stick, not good and it made for some cautious driving. This was further exacerbated when driving along an empty country lane, pushing along quickly, an elderly Range Rover appeared and tailgated me for a couple of miles. What a prannit you are Mr. JEZ, just overtake or pull back, if I’d not had a side full of chipboard then it might have been a different story.
Anyway my Friday evening was spent restoring my iPhone, only the second time already this year and then off to an early night so I could make a really early start on Saturday – which I did.
Saturday and up at seven and working by eight.
Straight away I had breakfast, set the fire going and got the washing started, into my overalls and working on the flooring.
What I first thought would be a simple job turned out to be much more involved than I’d first thought. There were only a couple of rows left to do and I thought I’d rattle them off in an hour or two. This wasn’t the case as the last rows are the hardest, it’s like doing a large jigsaw puzzle figuring out how to put in the final sheets and all the while still fitting the boards together with tongue and groove joints. It’s difficult to explain but if you’ve done it yourself you’ll realise that the nature of the boards prevents the last sheets from going in easily. There is also the extra added difficulty of the sheets having to go under the decorative panels on the door surrounds and also catering for the pull-out panels to access the underfloor valves and the second radiator.
Anyway I got my head around the problem and it involved some butt-jointing of sheets rather than using the tongue and groove, this meant putting wood supports between the joists to support the un-tongue and grooved panel joints. I also put the sub-architrave panels in second to last and dropped the final de-tongued panel into position just off edge rather than right on the edge.
This will all make sense once you tackle this yourself or if you’ve already done the job previously, reading it back it makes no sense to me even.
Anyway I didn’t stop at all until a late lunch at 1:30…
Post lunch and I felt some lumberjacking was in order, so out to the woodstore and wielding my axe I managed to chop some logs to a firebox-ish size. This is no mean feat for me, I’ve steadily got better and better with an axe and now I tend to mostly hit the log in the whereabouts where I intended to hit it. No more glancing blows with the logs flying off at 300mph across the garden, now I sometimes actually manage to cut some up as my logging ideals had initially intended. No more having to wear a back brace too as I now tended to hit the logs squarely rather than missing them spectacularly and jarring my once feeble un-lumberjacking back in the process.
Ten heroic minutes later and with a flexi tub full of logs to hand I was setting off back to the house when I turned and there was a welcome sight of my daughter and Anna coming to visit.
Now although in work mode it is always good to see my little girl, so an hour and a bit later of playing Little Big Planet and it was back to work.
The afternoon, now that the flooring was done, was to be set aside to fitting the little radiator I’d bought for the bedroom. This radiator was to supplement the designer one I had fitted front and centre, it wasn’t anything special to look at but on performance/size ratio it was quite spectacular and should offset any issues I may encounter with the main radiator. The intention too was to make its piping and underfloor gubbins accessible after the fact, basically just like the main radiator, so I intended to mount it all on a hatch to allow me to access any leaking pipework. This would also allow me to change the radiator should I feel that its whiteness played too heavily on the eye in contrast to the anthracite main radiator. Anyway it was well hidden in the second window recess so I hoped it would happily get on with heating the room and would be hidden in the cushions, sheets, carpets and curtains of the fully furnished room.
Anyway much measuring and sawing – in fact the day had been filled with lots of sawing – and one radiator was neatly fixed to the wall with the access panel in place.
Next I needed to fit the chrome radiator legs I’d bought, now where were they, an hour later and still no radiator legs and I determined to get a new set from Screwfix. Checking online and as it was now 6:20 Screwfix had closed, so again I was foiled by missing items.
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Pressing on with re-fitting the skirting boards in the absence of my chrome legs I quickly realised that fixing skirting with screws and rawlplugs wasn’t an ideal solution. I’d determined that no-more-nail-like products wouldn’t work well on the nasty stone surfaces I was trying to stick the skirting to, so I thought my only fallback was screws and rawls. Immediately after getting the skirting, cleaning it up and pre-drilling the holes through the wood into the stone the problems became apparent. Firstly the holes into the stone were well camouflaged by the unevenness of the stones and were impossible to find and fit with rawls. Secondly upon replacing the skirting the screw holes were a bit out of kilter with where they’d been, a teeny bit of wobble and it was all impossible, the screws couldn’t find the plugs and hey ho no fixy skirting.
I needed another solution so to YouTube I did turn.
What I’ve been missing all my life turned out to be hammer-in fixings. These wonders of modern science were tailored with a nail (or is it a screw) that’s got its own rawl-like nylon sheath. Rather than removing the skirting to fix the rawl into the hole made into the stone the nylon sheath goes straight through both the wood and the stone, so you don’t have to remove and refit the skirting. One then bangs in the nail with a big hammer and hey-presto the skirting is fixed to the wall. If one wants to then remove the skirting then the nail/screw simply screws out and it can be removed as easily as a screw in a rawlplug.
This is all in theory as I didn’t have any to hand, it meant finishing work at eight rather than my intended ten and then a visit with my little girl to ScrewFix the next morning for chrome legs and hammer-in fixings.