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.

Almost completed the demolition.

Just a month late, $550 over budget and getting ready for the next step. In the image above, that's actually dumpster #2. It's smaller than the first one. There are more piles of wood and lathe in the back. There was a LOT of rubbish to come out of this house, a lot more than I expected.

The good news is that the walls and the floors are just incredibly level and plumb. The maximum tilt to a wall is on the first floor, and it's off by 1/4". Geeze what ever shall we do? Heh heh.

The carpeting is up on the first floor and we got our first real look at the original wood floors underneath. They look to be in very good shape, minus about 400 nail holes per room. We spent the last day bending over with hammer, crowbar & pliers trying to pull them all out. We know that we plan on sanding the floors down and trying to repair as much as we can (some small holes drilled for conduit, etc.) and that a single nail can ruin a disc sander's sandpaper wheels and at $5 bucks a pop, that's $20 per nail you missed. I think it's worth it to find them and pull them out.

Unfortunately, in the dust, they're almost invisible. I have to swipe my feet from side to side over a patch of flooring, going all the way down the side of a wall, then turn around and sweep back about 2' over, eventually covering the entire floor. When my shoe snags, it's time to bend over and look for the little bugger.

btw: We're not using a drum sander-- it's too hard and too potentially damaging to the floors. We'll be using the 4-rotary sander discs. We saw it on "Ask This Old House."

Here's my fav shot for the day:


In this shot, looking from a hole in the third floor (the dark area is the joist under the third floor), you can see the hole in the second floor at the gas line that goes through to the first floor. Ah, the view..... But again, the floors are in good shape. Just a lot of lead paint to get scraped up. We're still trying to determine the best way to get the lead paint up, chemical paint removal, which keeps the toxic lead dust down to a null amount, -- or sanding, which scatters the cr@p everywhere, requires full tyvex suits and lead rated dust masks (i.e. respirators), but may be easier.

We'll let you know how it goes. I think there's a coin toss in my future.