Divertimento - Floor Refinishing

One of our readers had a couple questions regarding refinishing heart pine floors.

Heart Pine Floors

Now, we're no experts, but we've not got some real world experience and I think a bit of knowledge. I think the questions asked were insightful, so I'm going to encapsulate them and our responses here (I'm hoping it's OK with Brian):

At 09:39 PM 1/2/2009, Brian asked:

I have been reading your blog for a short while and am also starting the process of rehabbing an old brick home in suburban Philadelphia. I am beginning the process of refinishing floors and need to strip some tough varnish off of pine flooring. I was wondering if you had any experience using chemcial stripper before sanding and could offer me any tips and product recommendations. Thanks in advance.

Brian

The short answer is to use a light stripper immediately before sanding. A furniture refinisher worked great. We used "Klean-Strip Klean Kutter Refinisher". This worked pretty well in the standard manner with a scraper in corners or funky low spots and edges, but we also used it in a nontraditional manner.

We'd brush it over a tough spot, say 3'x3' and then take the sander right to it immediately, while still wet. The paint and especially varnish came right up, even with the HD random orbital sander (great for first timers). Also, it kept the sanding disks from gumming up so quickly. Don't be afraid to have someone stand on the sander to work on the tough spots, too.

You may want to look into denatured alcohol as well. I've read that it works well, but I've not tried it. Still, it's cheap and if you can test in in a hidden spot, I'd give it a try.

BTW, that Home Depot orbital sander is great for keeping the dust down too. That's especially worth while if you're concerned about lead dust.

I hope that helps.

Mark

At 11:31 PM 1/3/2009, Brian wrote:

Mark,

Thanks so much for the quick response. I have just a couple follow-up questions before we start the sanding process. Did you and your wife apply floor stripper to the entire floor and scrape everything in order to have a "clean floor" before sanding or did you only use stripper on the tough spots that the sander wouldn't put a dent in. I have one small room half sanded and had a terrible time with a HD drum sander. I would make a couple clean passes, gain some confidence and then the paper would load up with varnish and be trashed after about 4 minutes of work. Ideally I would like to strip the entire floor ( 2 upstairs bedrooms, a hallway and one large living room) and then sand with a random orbit 4 disc. Do you think I would be making more work for myself by stripping everything and then sanding or would it save me time and money in the long run. Our floors are very similar to your own although I have no idea if the varnish is the same. How did you deal with fumes and ventilation. I'd like to keep as many brain cells as possible and I've heard that chemical stripper is very carcinogenic and dangerous. Again thanks for your help and advice.

Brian

The Klean Kutter Refinisher was not too bad at all. I'd open a window or two. Maybe put a fan in, but you won't need a respirator or anything.

DW and I just brushed the stripper on tough spots and then sanded immediately while it was wet (key point). We did two 15x15 rooms in a day and a half with a faulty sander that way. The paint came RIGHT up with the refinisher but it was coming up pretty easily with the high grit paper. The varnish/shellac didn't come up easily at all and just turned gummy, so we hit it with the refinisher.

You can make the sanding disks last longer if you give them a light spray with WD40 before you start. You can just knock off the varnish and start again. (I'm told you can just open the dishwasher and spray the disks there since the detergent will clean it up--I didn't test this, however).

Now, I'm told that you can strip the entire thing first, and then sand, but I have no experience with it. I think I'd try it because if it is a pain or takes too long, you can just stop and go rent the orbital sander and make short work of it. I think you can do your entire sanding job in two days, easily using the refinisher and the random orbital sander.

I would talk with the smartest floor folks at your local HD about stripping the varnish. Often they've got some insights. By the time you're done with the project, you'll be intimate with about half the staff there. :)

Hope that helps.

Next up, Kitchen 2: Counter Tops and Sinks

Had to move the wall.

OK, playing catch up here.

We met with our HVAC guru, (www.PeakHVAC.com) and we'd been trying to figure out the best way to heat and cool the house. We at first thought we'd head a vent and return on each side of the dining room fireplace, but it turns out we'd need a lot more space for a second vent to carry air to the 3rd floor and it would make the dining room all.... wonky. Also, it would mean branching out in the basement and taking half of the vent-age (my word, not Chuck Phaeler's from Peak HVAC, heh heh) to the north side of the house and half to the rear, and we'd be talking uber-soffets like an encompassing, but warm, octopus.

So we determined we could fit the HVAC main ductwork up from the basement, up through the northeast corner of the kitchen (practically unused space), into the northeast corner of the bath/laundry room, and then into the 3rd floor. This way, the ductwork stays in a central location, and only branches out from the 'trunk' at the level it is needed.

There was one problem though with the return that was planned for the kitchen wetwall.

Yeah.

Well, we planned the location of the kitchen wetwall ever so carefully, making sure that the wetwalls on the second and third floor would all like up and even distribute some weight. I'm, not kidding, we spent HOURS trying to determine the exact location for premium placement and ease of use. But did we go into the basement and check out the ceiling to make sure that the joists that ran throughout the house also matched up in the basement? Nooooo, that would have been way too smart. Way.

Yeah.

So we built the kitchen wetwall not only right on top of a joist, but to make it all the more painful, it was a double joist.

The plumbing that we so carefully planned for had to come up through the wetwall on the west, then back across over the kitchen to the east, then back up through the floor to meet the bathroom on the second floor. OK, plumbing disaster averted... but the HVAC? Not so easy.

A few days after we made the plumbing work-around, Chuck (the HVAC boss) made the call that we'd have to either move the wall, or we'd have to have an angled return in the dining room that stuck out about 3" on the floor and sloped back to the wall to get around the joist screw up.

We moved the wall.

Now I'm halfway tempted to tell the plumbers that we can now run the PVC up the wetwall the way it was supposed to go in the first place-- just to see the looks on their faces.

Today's agenda: Replace last two rotted floor joists on the first floor with 2x12" PTL (Pressure treated lumber), and start pulling up the rest of the old tongue and groove 1" flooring (wearing a mask this time so as not to kill myself by inhaling the mold on the underside THIS time.) Then overlay with two full sheets of 1/2" OSB ( laid out so as to overlap and not have the edges on the second layer line up with the edge of the sheets underneath, aka staggered layout) and finish sistering 2x6's to the rotted joists on the 2nd floor for floor supports, fix the holes with OSB, then laying single sheets of OSB for the final subfloor prep.

Unless I have to move another wall.

Salvaging floorboards... how to kill yourself.

We obviously have quite a few holes in the floors of the first floor, and although the wood tongue and groove flooring is old, dirty, and altogether icky right now, I have faith. We are planning to use the remaining (non-rotted) wood from the first floor back room to fill in the holes of the cut outs made over the years for plumbing, HVAC and electrical in the front room and kitchen, then sand them and polyurethane them. Yes, I know, three coats.

So, in the past couple of weeks, as I've been pulling up the wooden floor boards in the back room and stacking them in a corner for eventual review to find the sections not rotted or ruined via my aggressive nail pulling and crowbar antics. The plan was to cut out the sections to save and chuck out the rest.

Yesterday, while the husband was cutting out a rotten section of flooring in the kitchen to be repaired with Oriented Strand Board (OSB) [it will be covered by kitchen cabinets, so no need to make it pretty] I began the process of reviewing the floorboards to cut out the sections to be saved. Anything that was salvageable was marked with a pencil line and an X on the part to be disposed of. I went through about 150 linear feet of floor boards, of which maybe only 65 was salvageable.

After pulling nails out, (or if I couldn't pull them out completely, I marked the areas where the nail snapped off, so I didn't accidentally cut through the same area with a saw later on) I used the circular saw to cut anywhere from 10" pieces to 6' pieces of floorboard that we can reuse. The holes that were cut for the old floor vents were about 10" x 10" so any sections of wood that were good, but less than 10" were set aside for making 'plugs', small circular cut holes that can be used to plug up the holes cut for small copper plumbing lines. I'll take some pictures as we get closer to that particular process.

What I wanted to mention at this point was the 'how to kill yourself' section of the blog.

Husband spent a lot of time going through the lead certification process and is very heads-up when it comes to lead dust. We bought the special masks that were rated for lead dust removal (N100 respirators) and it's like breathing through a HEPA filter. But now that the demo is basically over and most (if not all) of the lead surfaces have been removed, wearing the masks was basically reserved for when we were reinforcing the ceiling joists (a lot of dust and dirt falls in your face when you're drilling and pounding into 150 year old ceilings, trust me) and for sweeping up dust on the floor.

BIG mistake.

As we've mentioned before there's been a lot of moisture in the house in the last 50 years, and moreso in the last 2 weeks. The roofers are still waiting for a decent day to return to fix the roof and complete the gutter job, but the majority of moisture over the years has come in from the stack that was broken off and just dumping water into the dirt basement for a long long time. The very same dirt basement that is directly below the floorboards I was pulling up and stacking on the corner.

You ever have one of those moments, almost cartoonish, as if you were Wiley E. Coyote stepping to the edge of a cliff and holding up a sign that says, "hey look, a cliff" and then you step off of it?

Yeah, that was me. After cutting through about half of the floorboards and making rather quick work of the sorting process, it went like this:

Hub: "Hey babe, how are you doing?"
Wife: "Great, hon. Going great. Hey, what's this white stuff?"
Hub: (holding up invisible cartoony-like sign in my mind) "It looks like mold."
Wife: "Oh. Ok. I'll finish up in a bit."

So, I've been using a circular saw for about an hour to cut through the wood flooring with a thick coat of white mold, no respirator on, not even a paper mask, and I've been deep breathing the cloud of mold each time I make a pass. Niiiiice.

It's been about 26 hours since we finished up. It was just about the time the stabbing pain and the wheezing began for me. My head feels like a bucket of cement. My lungs ache. My eyes are dry and red. I am the epitome of good health gone to the seedy side of town.

I woke up this morning at 6:30 to get my office work done, finished up at 9:00 and went back to bed. Husband checked in on me occasionally to make sure I had a pulse. I woke up at 5PM. I'm still tired, cranky and have respiratory fatigue not unlike the days when I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and caught a mild case of pneumonia after college exams.

So, just a warning to all of you who would think of salvaging wood from a moist area of your home: please, wear a respirator. Learn from the mistakes of others, or join the club of cartoony sign holding dolts like myself.

Oh look, an anvil.

A look at the roof, boxgutter, and floor joists.

Well, the roof work has begun and last Saturday the fellas from Benchmark started working on the box gutters. Woot!

Much of the framing that the gutters sit on was just total rot, so the first thing was to firm up the supports.

The guys made quick work of replacing the bad wood and set up these new frames, seen from the inside of the third floor at the roofline.

I gotta say, they worked all day and into the night when they couldn't work any longer due to darkness taking over.

So far so good. There are actually 2 gutters that need repaired, one on the East side of the house, which is shown below (nice work on the molding, guys!) and the second is perpendicular to this one, and just above the left side of this box gutter where the two angled rooflines meet in the center of the house. That one's still a work in progress... (but what isn't?)


At this point I want to point out that the box gutter on the front of the house is still in decent shape, but we did have one little problem: The electric lines coming into the house from the street were intertwined with the downspout at the front of the house. Matt Maynard (of Benchmark Roofing) pointed out that this could possibly be a danger to him and his crew, justifiably so!

So off we went to put a call in to Duke Energy to resolve the problem. After a quick conversation we were assured that they would send someone out to inspect the lines. Well, I gotta give them credit, they were quick about it.

They came and took down the downspout while we were out.

I think we'll be calling Duke back.
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OK, now on to the floors:
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On the first floor, in the Northeast corner of the house (red arrow in above image), we have a pretty bad rot problem due to a defunct (aka rusted through) vent stack between the first and second floor.

In case I'm not being clear here: Hole in roof --> cast iron vent pipe--> hole in pipe dumping water into the wall and onto the second floor joist, down to the first floor joist, maybe for years now.

After pulling up the floor boards on the first floor where the rot started (trying to preserve as much as I could fo the good sections for use in the repairs we'll be doing in the front 2 rooms) I discovered this:

The top center of this image (Northeast corner of the house) is where the vent stack was dumping water into the house. You can see that the far left joist is gone and some previous repairs were attempted to shore up that corner, but they forgot to fix the problem (the stack pouring water into the house) so it's all still a mess.

But here's the killer.... the floor joists themselves.

Let me start with the history of the house. The east side of this room (about 6'x15') was once an outdoor area with basement access from the outside. (see image below) You can see the framing for the door in the floor in the Northeast corner of the room. Since this was once an outdoor area, the floor joists are pretty stable where they once stood under the exterior wall, about 6 feet in from the current East wall.

To support the floor when the original owners decided to expand the back room and encompass the basement access, (expanding the room by 6'x15') they sistered some beams to the existing joists and supported them on the existing foundation.

But then, someone decided to dig.

They dug out a lot of the dirt and half of the wall that was once supporting the exterior wall. They put in some lovely duct work that now is total cr@p.

So now we have this:

Yes, these joists (a solid 3"x10" beams) are only connected by three nails each and overlapping by only 4 inches with no support whatsoever underneath.

The scary thing is, they're REALLY stable.

We'll be shoring these up with a 2x6 crosswise underneath where the joists are joined together and support them with a metal post underneath.

The we'll be placing 2 layers of .5" OSB on top for the flooring.... as soon as we have a roof that doesn't dump water back into the house. :-)

Bouncy floors

OK, so the third floor is as solid as a rock. The FIRST floor is also solid and sturdy. So what the hell happened to the second floor? Did the builders just get lazy?

This is an image of the joists under the third floor, the stable one. The floor I'm standing on to take the picture bounces as I walk across it, enough to make a Yankee seasick.

And of course, I have the 'heights' thing, so I'm constantly thinking I'm going to fall through and kill myself, at which point I know my husband will immediately make plans for building a large, (nay, massive) brick and stone outside grill monstrosity at the rear of the house, and I just can't have that, now can I?

So we need to stabilize the second floor. All of the original criss-cross joist braces in the picture above, are oddly missing on the underside of the second floor. I think we'll just add in 2x8" blocking, staggered by 8-10", and then, since we're not planning on having wood floors on the second floor, we'll just overlay the whole floor with 3/4" plywood or OSB and screw it to the subfloor.

Update: We just bought a 90 degree drill attachment for the cordless drill to fit in between the roof joists, a 3/8" drill bit and a lot of 3/8" bolts to attach 2x8's to the sides of the joists for reinforcing (called "sistering"). The drill bit seems to work well in cutting through the joists, a lot easier than I was expecting, actually. I've heard stories about the old joists being close to petrified wood and going through a lot of drill bits.

The only thing I wish was that we had taller ladders. Those joists are way up there and a tricky balancing act on two ladders holding up a 2x8. Something you may want to consider.