Go Big or Go Home

It has been a long time since I posted anything to the blog. I thought I would post up a couple pictures of what I have been working on lately.

I purchased a 1988 Ford Mustang LX with a 5.0L engine several years ago. I have been working on the car/engine slowly over the past couple years. Recently I sold the 5.0L engine and purchased a Ford 460 big block. The engine was rebuilt (bored .040) shortly before I purchased it. (Thats 7.7 Liters if anyone is wondering) Since I know very little about carbs (and engines for that matter) I decided to build an engine run stand so that I can get the engine running before installing it in the car.

Here is the bad boy:



The engine run stand is nearly complete and turned out better than I expected. (My welding skills are very poor) My plan is to complete assembly of the motor over the next couple of days and I hope to attempt to fire the motor this weekend!

Here is a picture of where I plan to stuff this big motor.

Currently the car is completely stripped and is awaiting sandblasting several areas in the interior. I am not looking forward to this work which is why it has been sitting in this state for several months. I hope that hearing the 460 run will motivate me to finish the body so that I could maybe drive this car sometime before I am 30.

I have big plans for this car but am trying to take one step at a time.

Hopefully my next post will be pictures/video of a running engine.

Hardwood Flooring

I want to start off by thanking everyone who helped with the flooring project. I am pretty sure I would have given up without your help.

Chris, Cortana, Dad, Elise, Hardcore, Stacey, Tony

Here we go.


This is a poor shot of our kitchen to give you an idea of what we were working with.



Enter ~200 square feet of Rustic #2 Red Oak hardwood flooring from Lumber Liquidators. I was a bit apprehensive about buying flooring from LL after reading some of the reviews I found online but the saleman was very honest and helpful. The wood looks to be pretty nice for $1.58 a square foot.

The grain looks really nice and suprisingly the milling looks pretty good as well.

In the past, I have not had great success removing trim without ruining it. (cracks/gouges) The kitchen has many different types of trim so I hope to save as much as I can. I expect that I will have to add quarter round moldings in addition to the normal trim to cover up the expansion gaps that are neccessary for hardwood flooring.

I started by removing the trim and register near the sliding glass door. I was hoping to be able to see what type of subfloor I had and how many layers of flooring were going to need to be removed.

This does not look so good. What a mess.

Start peeling back the layers and it only looks worse. It looks like I have the following layers of flooring:

linoleum
1/4" plywood

linoleum (especially ugly I might add)

~3/8 - 1/2" plywood

3/4" plywood

At this point I am not sure how far down I will need to go before I install the hardwood flooring.

After thinking about the situation I decided that I needed to determine what level of subfloor is the rest of the house at. I will need to pull up any layers that are not at the same level as the hallway/living room. Therefore, I pulled up more trim. It is hard to see in this picture but I cracked this small piece in half when I will prying it out. So much for me being careful:)

This little tool was veryful during the flooring project. Elise "accidentally" (I love you hun) forgot to return this tool after a day of volunteering at Habitat for Humanity and we had no way to return it. Anyway, it was very effective at pulling bent nails and prying on trim.

I tried to be as detailed as possible while labeling the trim so that I could get it back in the correct location. (This label may have been a bit excessive)

Thankfully the top layer of linoleum was only glued around the edge of the room. This made it pretty easy to remove in large sections.

Ogres are like onions.

They stink?

Yes. No.

Oh, they make you cry.

No.

Oh, you leave em out in the sun, they get all brown, start sproutin’ little white hairs.

NO. Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers.

Oh, you both have layers. Oh. You know, not everybody like onions

This kitchen definately has layers and I am only interested in the bottom most layer. This picture represents the point in time when I realized that the hallway/living room only has 3/4" plywood subfloor. This means all other layers have to go. Great phone call:

Me: Hey Chris

Chris: Hey

Me: What'cha doin

Chris: Working on my bathroom like I should be

Me: Huh, you want to stop that, not get anything done with your project, work your butt off scraping layers of subfloor (where they used a million nails, staples and screws), freeze half to death loading the garbage into your truck, miss most of the Packer's game, haul it to your house, and unload it on your curb for your garbage man to pick up?

Chris: Sure

Me: Awesome ... bring a shovel

Unfortunately, the cabinets were installed over the 3/8" plywood so they had to be removed.

Arby, "my rofl knife goes slice slice slice". The top layer of linoleum came up pretty easily. In hindsight, the 1/4" plywood was not too difficult either.

We took a little break from removing flooring and pulled up the countertops. We are uncertain if these will be replaced right away or not so we were careful while moving them out to the garage.

The cabinets were unscrewed and taken out the garage as well. I would love to refinish or replace them but this has not been decided yet.

Here is the kitchen without lower cabinets. The room seems very spacious.

Cortana: I want to come insides.

This subfoor was a real pain to get up. You had to pry up the edge to get under the long nails and screws before you could use the shovel to pull up larger chunks. The wood would break at every row of nails/staples which was approximately every 6 to 12 inches.

Cortana: Hey guys, it's pretty cold out here. I would love to come insides.

It is hard to see in this picture but the last 4' x 6' section took forever to get out. A combination of exhaustion and a billion nails made for a rough last section of work.

Oh, and Chris broke my floor scraper. You need to be more careful next time ... that was $3 at Harbor Freight.

We did our best to clean up the mess before we headed out for dinner.

Cortana: I am not happy about this project.

Cortana: Super cute though.

Elise and I painted the kitchen prior to laying the flooring so that if we spilled it would be no big deal. I made sure to fill all of the holes and seams around the cabinets in case they ended up at a different height than before. The paint stick in this picture is no joke. I picked it up on sale at Menards for less than $10 and have used it for several painting projects. It works well and removes the need to constantly be refilling your roller. Plus you get to feel like you are part of an infomercial. Give it a try on your next painting project for 3 easy payments of only $49.95.

Here you can see the difference in color. It is subtle, just the way I like it. Nice choice Elise. We planned to put of two coats of paint but on the last wall of the second coat we ran out of paint. I was nervous about the color match so we slathered on a third coat.

Izzy: Meew, meew ... I am not happy about this project either. (Lisa and Tom's dog)

Houston, we have a problem. I started driving screws every 6" into the subfloor with the hope to reduce the squeaks. Using my studfinder I was looking for a stud in the doorway of the kitchen. This picture shows where I found the "stud". As it turns out the stud that I was looking for was the main 3/4" water line for the house. It took me several seconds to figure out what was happening when the water was shooting up out of the floor ~5 feet. I dashed downstairs to turn off the water to the house. The valve is under our stairs and difficult to get to. I shut it off and went to look at the damage only to find that the water was still on. I scrambled to turn off all the water valves that I could find in the utility room. The water kept pouring into the basement. I dove back under the stairs to find that there is another valve further down the water line that actually worked to shut off the water to the house. Panic slowly began to fade.

Well, it was almost 10:00PM and I had no interest in calling a plumber so I thought I better get to work fixing the pipe. I figured my best bet would be to cut a hole in the subfloor so that I could work on the pipe from above.

There it is. You wouldn't think such a small hole would make such a huge mess. When I was driving the screws I missed the pipe twice (left and right) before I "found" it.

I cut the pipe with a small pipe cutter right on top of the hole.

The inside and outside of the pipe were cleaned thoroughly.

You can see the work gloves that St. Nick brought me this year. I had never really wore gloves until this year and now I can't work without them. No more bleeding from the hands while I work.

Here you can see the slip joint soldered onto the first side of the pipe. I was lucky that I just purchased all of the materials to run copper pipe throughout my garage for the air compressor. I had plenty of fittings on hand in case I needed to perform a more complex fix.

I am not afraid to liberally apply the flux. Better to have too much than not enough.

Here is the slip joint fully soldered and cooling down before I turn the water back on. In case you are wondering, the pipe had plenty of play so that I could easily get the slip joint onto either end of the pipe. I have been asked twice how I was able to get the slip joint on ... the pipes in my house are held up by hangers instead of screwed tightly to the studs.

Fixed ... for the evening. I put a board over the hole so that my dog did not hurt herself in the morning when she was running to the door.

My dad finished putting screws into the subfloor while I exchanged the 2" floor staples for 1 1/2" staples. After the screw incident, I was not interested in putting a staple through anything else during this project.

I used 15# felt paper between the subfloor and the hardwood to help prevent wood on wood squeaks.

At this point the pictures get a little sparce. My dad and I laid most of the room in one day so we were working, not taking pictures. We started by marking a line with the laser level that was parallel to the hallway. I did my best to set the board so that they would be evenly spaced on either side of the hallway.

I picked scrap wood for the first two boards and screwed them to the floor through the top. The idea here is that these two boards will be the first boards I lay when I do the hallway (a future project). I will use a slip tongue to reverse the direction of the boards for the hallway, living room, and master bedroom.

I used my 16 gauge hand nailer to lay the first few rows. I put nails through the top where they would be covered by trim and throught the tongue.

I can already tell that the Rustic #2 flooring is exactly the look my wife and I were going for.

Here we are finishing up for the day. This picture shows the floor nailer that I bought from Harbor Freight. I am very impressed with the quality of this tool. I only had one staple jamb while laying the flooring and it was my own fault. I loaded more staples into the tool while there was still one staple left. This caused the tool to shoot two staples at once. I used a 20% off coupon and got the nailer for $120. Owning the tool will save me a bunch of money over renting one whe we get to laying the floor throughout the rest of the house.

We did our best to lay down blankets, etc to protect the floor while it was being laid.

The next day I sorted the remaining wood into different categories. (Enders, splits, worm holes, milling issues, knots, garbage)

Hardcore and Chris came over to help me finish the last couple feet of flooring. This took longer than it should have because I was a bit too selective when sorting the boards the day before. We did our best to put garbage wood under the fridge, stove, and dishwasher.

Setting the last few rows took forever because we could not use the floor nailer. I used a combination of hand nailing, nailing through the top, and the 16 gauge nailer to set the final boards. They don't look as nice as the rest of the floor but there wasn't much else we could do beside maybe blowing out the wall and rebuilding it after the flooring was laid.

Wow the floor looks nice.

Here we are cleaning up the floor before we run the sander over it for the first time.

I used 4 mil plastic to "seal" off the room. As it turned out the sander does and good job of allowing the dust to get airborne.

I rented the Varathane ezV sander from Menards for $35 a day. This beast is heavy. The sanding head has three random orbital heads with a vacuum that sucks up the dust around the heads.

Menards sells three grits of sandpaper for this machine: 36, 50, 80. After reading reviews online I bought 3 packages (3 pads per pack) of the 36, 3 packages of the 50, and 2 packages of the 80. We started with the 50 with the thought that if that didn't work fast enough we could switch to the 36. It turns out the 50 grit was plenty to level my boards. In fact the entire sanding process was pretty easy and only took a couple hours.

When the floor was satifactorly smooth we switched to the 80 grit to remove the marks left behind from the 50 grit. This went even quicker than sanding with the 50 grit.

After a thorough cleaning (sweeping, vacuuming, wiping with a cloth) my dad and I stained the floor. This went quick and really made the floor "pop". In fact it changed the floor so much that I was a little nervous about what Elise's reaction would be when she saw the floor for the first time. My dad and I decided that the best description of the floor was bold.

The stain smelled pretty bad so I went and watched Sherlock Holmes with Elise, Tony, and Stacey. When we retuned home, Elise said she loves the floor.

I don't have any pictures of applying the polyurathane but the process is relatively simple. I used the Varathane applicator on a broom handle to apply. Mix the poly and pour some into a pitcher. Pour some on the floor, spread it out evenly, and back brush so that the strokes fade away. Be sure to not corner yourself in the room and that the coats go on in a very thin layer. Any places that pool up can be seen when it dries.

These pictures show the floor with the first coat of poly dry. This coat took nearly 1/2 of a gallon where as the following coats took less than a 1/4 of a gallon.

Future Update:

The floor now has 5 coats of poly and is complete. I will update with the cabinet installation, etc in the next few days.