Faux Painted Plank Floor!!

We got back on Monday at about noon, but spent the whole afternoon and evening watching t.v. Catching up on everything we missed. We had t.v. withdrawl for sure. We are good now though.

When we got to the cottage, we got right to work. We unloaded the Rent A Wreck truck that we booked for the week. That truck worked pretty hard too. It was worth the money. The next morning, let the pain begin.

First thing we had to do was lay the new subfloor. We used 1/2 inch good one side plywood. It doesn't really matter what kind as we ended up painting it anyway. This was done on Saturday, I know because we had the wrong screws with us, so we laid out the plywood and tacked the edges. Jenn brought up the right screws on Sunday - Mother's Day!

All done laying it out. You can see from the outside light that it was getting dark. We were glad to leave the next step for the next day. Tired every night.

Then began the tedious and painful act of screwing down the plywood and filling the screw heads and the seams. We choose the wrong filler, but we were both so into working on the floor that neither one of us wanted to drive into town and pick up different stuff. The stuff we had was flexible, good we thought for the contracting and expansion of the floors in winter and summer, seeing as we don't heat the cottage in the winter. The good thing about the choice we made was that it was not sandable so we had to put it on sparingly, saving us that step of sanding and the dust that that step creates. Unfortunately, this type of filler required more coats that we were willing to do. After the second coat and the overnight dry time, we decided that enough was enough and if we put another coat on we were going to get off of the schedule. The floor is in a cottage, so not expected to be perfect. And it's not, but good for our purposes.

Boy were my knees bruised after this! Would have been smart to wear knee pads, but I didn't and I paid for it the next day! Hans has knees of steel I think. It didn't bother him at all.

After that was the fun part, the "planking" as I like to call it. Hans did several samples for me of different depths and widths of grooves. After I decided on one, which is harder than you think, he started grooving out the "planks". After measuring out a 7.5" plank, he tacked down a board to get a straight line, and ran his router down. Sometimes we needed to move the line to accomodate the screw heads. Planks are not uniform thank goodness. Then I went up and down the floor marking out the ends of the planks. We called it a night after that. I'm sure it was dark by then.

The next morning, I don't know what day it was, by now they were running into each other pretty good. Painful day one, painful day three. All the same. We needed to put the tile down for the new wood stove. Of course, the existing fresh air return was not in the right place, so it needed to be moved, after than we laid down the tile. We weren't interested in making any tile cuts, so we made the platform larger than it had to be. We've laid enough tile to know how time comsuming it can be if you need to be fussy. Good thing we are passed that fussy, cut the tile stage. We didn't even use the spacers this time. I seem to remember we were really hungry too. Tired, in pain and hungry. Amazing it looks so good!

We moved the wood stove onto the tile after the grout had set. The damn thing weighs about 300 empty of it's firebricks, but we really didn't have much trouble moving it. Just good old push and pull worked. We were worried about moving the fireplace and the wood stove where they needed to be. But it ended up being easier than we thought it would.

The next step was paint. Experience and disappointment has taught me to always us a primer and a good quality paint. I decided on latex primer and gloss deck paint. Interior/exterior. The colour - called English leather. LOL. Where do they come up with these names. Of course each groove had to be painted in by hand. More knee pain.

We put the first finish coat on before we left for the day on Friday. We needed to come into the city, return the truck and meet Jenn for dinner. My 47th birthday was on the next day, so we went to our favourite place, Red Lobster! Yeah for fish! We headed back out to the lake after dinner and grocery shopping. Saturday and Sunday were spent messing around with Hans' man room for Hans and sleeping and reading for me. We brought back in to the room our chairs and one of the tables so we would have somewhere to eat and sit and read. It was too cold to go out to the porch or the deck. The cats wandered around back and forth from porch to inside for the whole week. One very cold morning Hans caught them curled up together in one cat bed snuggling. They both jumped up when he opened the door. God forbid anyone saw them being nice to each other. Typical siblings.

This is how we left it. We painted our selves out of the room on Monday morning. Second finish coat. We left the ceiling fan on and the one heater on medium in case it got really cold. Hopefully it will be nice and hard on Friday night and we can put our furniture back on Saturday morning. Isn't it lovely? And now that we have all the parts, we can put the wood stove pipe up and we'll be able to make a fire. Life is good. Of course, we aren't done yet! Not much. Really. No really. Depends on which list you use. teehee