Finished Floors - Finale

It's been a jet setting week and a bit going through London, Oslo and Copenhagen and the week before it all was a trip trip to Belize. Yeah....haven't done much with the apartment.

While I was gone though, I did have the rest of the floor refinished (bedroom, closets and foyer). Jen was able to take some pics during the sanding progress. It's crazy to see how much paint was on the wood floor in the closets.


The finished floor looks great! The only odd thing is that they didn't lighten up as much as the living room did, but they are still a lot lighter and in a far superior condition to what they were.


My Dad and Uncle Steve are coming out this weekend to help with tiling mainly and odds and ends. My goal is to get the bedroom painted this week so people can sleep here this coming weekend, assuming we get a toilet installed after tiling too. It's ambitious, but could happen.

Looking forward to this half of the apartment being painted too and using both areas of the apartment.

Finished Floors

I arrived back home from Aspen late last night and didn't get a chance to go to the apartment and see the floors. I went straight away after work today and was so pretty stoked to see how it turned out.

The area around the radiator that needed to be repaired turned out great. I'm also really pleased how it all lightened up nicely too.



Now the floor is done, I'm going to get onto painting. I've scheduled some time with my interior designer friend, Bryant, to talk about paint colors for the whole apartment. I still don't like making these types of decisions so I think I'll leave them to Bryant.

Refinishing Progress

I just got a message from my neighbor who is overseeing the floor refinishing for me while I'm gone. He took a quick snap of the refinished floors in the living room and kitchen. Not going to post it here as I'm sure it's not representative of the real thing, but it looks awesome and I can't wait to see it in person!

Blackhole Bathroom

After shelling out money to contractors, the major repairs to the bathroom plumbing and flooring is done. I used the same plumber as I had for the work in the kitchen and he finished things off in a day which was great so I didn't loose all my running water in the apartment.

The floor was also done quickly, but a bit trickier. I hired the same contractor that I used to install my recessed lighting back at the early beginnings of the project. His crew were very professional, on time, and clean. They ripped out the whole concrete subfloor and tiling, installed a new standing waste valve for the tub (that's a drain valve if you're not familiar with that term) and poured a new floor all in one day.

The new floor has helped two fold by leveling the floor and sealing up piping penetrations, reducing noise traveling up from the apartment below (not that there was much before, but you can certainly tell the difference).

With the floor and plumbing finished it's time to finish framing out walls for drywall and tile board. The small space and odd brick corners is going to make it a bit tricky and time consuming, but it's nothing that won't be done in a couple evenings and some noisy mornings of sawing and screwing.

Super floored!

Today was a long back breaking knee grinding day laying down the kitchen floor...but it looks awesome.

The flooring took us a bit longer to complete then I expected. We had a bit of a learing curve with the manual nailers Dad got from a friend in Michigan. The short story was that you really have to hit these things a lot harder then you think.

Once we sorted that out, we got a system going where I was tapping in the boards and holding the nailer while Dad swung away to pound them in.



We finished things up around 4PM, 4 hours later then I expected, but that's OK. Both of us were extremely tired and sore from crawling around on our knees all day, so we decided to call it quits despite the large amount of mudding left.

So much was accomplished this weekend and I'm excited to finish up most of the mudding this week and hopefully begin priming half of the apartment this coming weekend.

"Trucking" Ahead

I can't believe how fast the past few weeks have gone by. A lot of work has been done with help from many hands, and trucks. I've been in the local ZipCar Toyota Tacoma all too much in the past 4 weeks. I think that I may be the only person renting it as the mirrors and seat position always seem adjusted perfect for me.

Yet, while the price of gas has gone down the cost to rent the ZipCar hasn't, nor has drywall and other construction materials. Yet, just about everything I need to finish the major construction is in the apartment now.

The plumbing was even finished on the 16th. The sink was successfully moved over 2.5' I know, it was probably dumb for me to pay that much to move the sink over but I really feel it is going to make a world of difference.


Although the plumbing is in, my permits haven't cleared yet compliments of someone else in my building who has a violation for construction without a permit...grrrr.

The lesson of the week has been to relate the finishes to the placement of the infrastructure. In my hurry to get the electrical done on the last visit from the Michigan crew I forgot about the mounting height of the outlet boxes in relation to the picture frame molding. Long story short, I ended up moving every electrical box down a few inches...which proved to be difficult for some.

Despite my earlier lack of attention to detail, everything else has been moving forward. The last of the drywall was hauled up on Wednesday night last week and I began to hang it last weekend. More was tackled this weekend and I'm really happy with how the room has been shaping up. I spent a fair amount of time last week running all the power and light switches to the island position.

Today was a bit frustrating as I tackled re-doing the 2x4 framing for the kitchen wall. The pipe re-routing threw a bit of a kink into the original location for 2x4's, but I think I worked out a decent solution. My internal interior designer started thinking about whether or not to extend the wall to the door or stop it at the drain pipe. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to extend it to the door but I'll sleep on it tonight.

Finally, I wired up everything for the kitchen - 2 counter outlets, 1 dishwasher whip (loose wires), 1 stove outlet and one whip for a range hood.

All this took much more time then expected so my ambitions to finish the ceiling were kill joyed.

Yet, I have started a bit of mudding and plan to do more this week in preparation for Dad and Co. arrival on Friday. The ideal plan would be to have everything mudded before they get here so we can sand, prime, install wood floor and demo the bathroom walls/floor.

More to come this week.

Jacked Up

A bit of radio silence for the past few weeks, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been progress. After a early AM trip to Brooklyn and a few weekends of work, the ceiling is insulated and the drywall is up. Leveling this ceiling in this area was a bit more tricky with the twisted beams. I tackled it as best I could but its far from perfect. Hopefully it won't be too noticeable.


Furring strips are up on the wall and I made the important decision today to glue/screw on 2x4's around the kitchen window. For some reason the plaster was directly applied to the brick on the West wall in the kitchen, unlike the living room. Of course this never posed a problem when the 2 rooms were separated by a wall, but now it is a different story. This should turn out to be OK.

Besides the basic labor of gluing and screwing there have been some other bits to figure out with flooring and plumbing. Moving the kitchen sink to the right has become more complicated then I first thought. All of the piping needs to be moved over quite significantly which involves shutting off the building water in addition to filings with the DOB. Making a long story short, I got three estimates that ranged from $1275 - $3300!!! Guess which one I went with...yes, the cheap one. Work starts on the 16th of Dec.

The flooring quest has really just been one to find a cheaper way to do the kitchen. After debating whether or not I could install flooring I just convinced myself I would learn how to do so. That's what the Internet is for, right? I got the goods and they are sitting in a warehouse in NJ waiting for me to pick it up. The plan is to install this when Dad is here just after Christmas.

I may appear a bit behind on schedule, but I'm around every weekend through the end of the month, so I feel I'm make some more progress rapidly. I expect to start mudding the ceiling this week and I've already scheduled another drywall haul for next week. Back to the grind after entertaining my friends from the UK who decided to sleep in this crazy mess for a week. Who knew these wonderful workhorses could double as dinner tables?


In the mean time, the Christmas tree will take up a bit of space to add to the holiday construction cheer.

No show

There haven't been many disappointments in this project so far and the ones that have jumped up have been very minor.

This past week/weekend I had my first major disappointment - the floor contractor no showed and didn't return my messages.

Now many of you might be saying "typical contractor" right about now, and I agree to an extent. It just seems super odd that someone with great references, who called me back promptly and gave a decent estimate would do such a thing. I can only believe that something catastrophic happened since his wife runs the business with him and she didn't call back either.

After 5 days of phone calls and waiting I've given up. It was somewhat of a toss up to do the floors now anyhow, the real advantage being that I would get the closets back. Yet, I would be stretching money a bit right now and I'm still moving stuff back and forth between rooms. Maybe it was for the best.

To keep things moving forward I began the task of clearing out the living room and moving everything back into the bedroom last night. I hope to start demolition this weekend and get the walls and some of the kitchen cabinets done, leaving the ceiling and the rest of the kitchen for next weekend.

Why worry about wood?

I never really lived anywhere with hardwood floors until I moved to NYC. At first it seemed like a luxury since each apartment ad would point out "HARDWOOD FLOORS!"

I quickly learned that almost every apartment has them, varying greatly in their quality.

I wouldn't say my floors are anything to oooooh and ahhhhh about, but they have the potential to be nice with a bit of care, which I haven't been giving to them by knocking down plaster and dragging tools across them. The closet floors were painted over at one point and then had linoleum laid on top. Although they all are a bit wavy, it will be nice to restore what I belive is likely some of the original character to the apartment.

After a bit of thought, I've determined it is not worth my time to learn how to sand, repair and refinish these floors. This is common work in NYC and it doesn't take much time or money.

So after 3 estimates I've picked Brian Huch of Groundforce Restoration to re-finish the floors. I know a good contractor when I see one and Brian met all of my criteria. He showed up on time, was well dressed, had formal proposal sheets, wanted 10% down and offered references and his insurance for the co-op managing agent in our first meeting. Best part was that his price was competitive against the other two bids.

To my surprise, the floors are a red oak (who would have thought?). They should lighten up a bit when they have been sanded, which I think will be great.

The door thresholds won't be replaced. I'm trying to go for a continuous look to the floor. If I don't like it, I can always buy new thresholds.

While I'm out of town on Thursday thru Sunday he'll begin repairing the thresholds, various spots where the trim was cut into the flooring and the water damage from the radiator in the bedroom, front closet, bedroom closet and foyer.



With the room cleared, my living quarters are stuffed.


Careful in the bathroom as we don't want anyone to get a sliver when you use the toilet.