What I've Been Up To

There hasn't been much activity on my blog lately because the Frau and I have been doing a renovation of one of our apartment's rooms.  If any of you have had a project like this, I'm sure you know why not much woodworking goes on during this process.

Add on the fact that I have chosen not to spend any vacation hours for this project, and it gets done only during evenings and weekends.  That next project is just going to have to wait!

The first thing we did was empty this room - which essentially is what I would call a rec room - of 15 years worth of crap that we've collected.  Jeesh!  Who knew all that stuff would fit up there?

We hauled about 12 car loads of stuff down to a local storage shed, and probably an equal number of carloads to the dump.

The gross old carpet had to go, too.  Unfortunately, it was glued down.  Doubly unfortunately, my father-in-law did a particularly good job of gluing it down when he installed it.

Lucky for you, there are no photos of all this.

But here is one of the room after the carpet came out.

We laid down a quality underlayment, and used a really nice looking oak parquet.  This one has a thin layer of oak on top, a layer of some softwood, probably fir, on the bottom, and a layer of MDF in the middle.  Over all, a good looking and (hopefully) stable product.

One of the challenges was there are two cubby holes like this in the room.

I have laid several parquet floors in the past, and I usually use my DeWalt 18V circular saw to cut the parquet planks to length when the end of the row is reached.  I decided this time I was going to try hand tools, and decided my trusty Dick saw would get the job.

This ryoba saw worked fantastic for this!  The kerf is way thinner, so less dust is generated.  Plus, the sawdust doesn't fly all over the room like with my power tools.  Less noise, so the building's strict noise policy is not violated, and I think it really is no slower than using the power saw.

The only time I got a power tool out was the jigsaw, which I chose to use for the rip cuts.

Here is the toolkit I used to install the floor.

Overall, the floor came out meeting our expectations. 

We like how it looks.

The next step is we have some built-ins being custom made for this room, then fill them up with all the crap we have in storage.  The idea is this room will look nice rather than just collect all of the stuff that doesn't have a place to be put away.