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I have a long-standing aversion to traditional psychiatric therapy , but I’m of mostly Irish descent, have red hair, and the temper that goes with it. So, to deal with aggression, I turn to DIY projects around the house (plus, I’m cheap, and refuse to set the thermostat above 60Ã?° despite our current 14Ã?° temperature in Cincinnati, so the work helps keep me warm).
My last project was redoing my 1970s-style bathroom (I posted a picture of the shower in an earlier entry here). But that’s about finished (I still have some trim moulding to run, but I’ve managed to overlook that for some time now).
When I bought my 1895 house seven years ago, the first thing I planned to do was tear out the nasty green carpet in the living room and dejected-looking parquet in the dining room and hallway, and lay down new flooring. So finally, after seven years of kvetching about the ugly carpet and sad parquet, I got started on it last Sunday. I began in the dining room, and when I got down to the original pine flooring, I was very excited. As you can see in the picture at the top (along with the tiny Christmas tree I have yet to put away), it’s actually in pretty good condition, and I was fairly certain it could be sanded, refinished and made to look right pretty. So I called my floor guy and made an appointment for him to come over and take a look (I hate sanding , my skinflint nature halts abruptly when it comes to doing things I despise).
Then, I got started in the living room, dutifully cutting the carpet into 4′ pieces and rolling them per the specifications of our local trash collectors. Underneath was a layer of Masonite, so I pulled all that too, along with what seemed like thousands of nails. And then I hit a bad patch. A very bad patch , literally. But hey, I’m a novice woodworker , how hard can it be to tooth in replacement boards? Simply cut out the bad boards at the joists with a circ saw, clean up the ends of the cut with a chisel, and nail a proper patch into place.
Well, like most of my crazy undertakings, it turns out to be harder than I expected , mostly because I need 100-year-old boards, so they’ll match. I’ve scavenged material from the third-floor closet, where I’ll put in new replacement boards (no one will ever see those), and started to cut the patches to size. But, the third floor has only 3-1/4″ boards, and the living room is a mix of 3-1/4″ and 4-1/4″. If anyone knows where I can find 25-35 board feet of 100-year-old pine floor boards, please let me know. And if anyone has the name of a good psychiatrist….
p.s. For the record, I wore gloves. But there was no jointer in sight.
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