If you want to know why there wasn’t a post last week, and won’t be one this week… More info after the break.
Contents
Set the Stage
It’s 12:30am. I’ve been awake for nearly 20 hours and I hear, “Honey, the floor is squishy?”
Neat. REALLY FREAKING NEAT.
I walk to her sewing room, which is the central room in our house, and the floor is in fact squishy. I will admit that I had a bit of fun squishing on it like a 2 year old in a bounce house, but I grew increasingly bothered by the situation.
Queue 90 minutes of me trying to find where the water is coming from and my wife helping. Eventually we found a triple threat:
- It poured rain and there appears to be an intermittent leak of some sort near our vent.
- My wife left the shower on with the shower head on “pause”, which due to our archaic plumbing caused extra drain pressure exacerbated by…
- The air handler’s drain overflowed. The average air handler in Florida can drain 50-60 gallons of water a day, and ours was clogged.
- Quaternary disaster - The fellow that installed our handler didn’t put in an emergency overflow switch.
More Fun!
Our air handler is in our storage room. Getting to it meant pulling out a lot of (water damaged) widgets and do-dads. All of that got put in front of our washer and dryer.
I had to tear up 2 walls to figure out where the leak was because the water was depositing itself inside the air-handler box, essentially inside the walls.
To even begin thinking about fixing the floor, which was no doubt molding up within hours, we had to purchase a large shed ($$$) and transfer not only our ‘storage items’, but my wife had to pack up her large sewing space so that my brother and I could transfer the equivalent of over 1,000 liters of sewing equipment to the shed.
That’s not to mention the items that’ve ended up in my studio, and how my workshop is a complete disaster from frantically trying to get the house livable again.
The post I was working on is workshop based too, so that’s on hold until…
The floor
I’m not physically as capable as I convince myself that I am, but my brother and I managed to pull up the floor. We knew the floor was both not level and not flat, but when washing the floor we noticed that it was a lot worse than thought.
That’s where I am now. We purchased underlayment cement primer, the pink stuff in the picture above, and got that down for today’s pouring.
What’s left
We still need to:
- Pour cement.
- Fix walls.
- Buy flooring.
- Make baseboards.
- Make trim..
- Make transitions and thresholds.
- Replace doors because the new flooring will be 1/2” (12mm) thinner than the previous flooring. The current doors already required dangerously high thresholds to seal.
- Fix walls.
- Put everything back in the room.
- Rebuild the storage area.
- Build storage solutions (shelving and carscasses) for the shed.
Meh.
Hopefully we can get most of the work done by the weekend.
So there’s no way I can get the time to finish a post for this weekend, or next, and possibly the week after. If I feel like I have a few extra hours than I’ll do a small review. I really want to make sure I get something out next weekend, but I have to temper my enthusiasm with appropriate rest.
Thanks for reading!
Meta
This floor has taken me around 30 hours of work to deal with so far.