Wax Trax

At the end of the last post, we were rinsing and scrubbing, scrubbing and rinsing, after acid-staining the floor. According to the instructions, we had to keep rinsing until no more residue remained. This turned out to be a LOT of scrub-rinse-repeat. Our test patch took eight cycles, and, as it turned out, the entire floor took at least that many.

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Turn on Thee Acid House

After working upstairs for a while, we decided to turn our attention to the downstairs. We had planned all along to stain and seal the concrete floor, because we like the looks of a stained concrete floor, and because it allows the in-floor heat to work in the most efficient way possible, with no other floor coverings getting between the heated tubing and our toes. Another important benefit of staining and sealing is that a darker floor will absorb more heat from sunlight, maximizing our passive solar gain.

The first order of business was clearing the floor – not an easy task, as it was covered with stacks of wood, piles of boards, towers of logs, tools, more tools, shelves, slabs of wood, and wood. Years of accumulated stuff. We moved stuff upstairs, we moved stuff to the porch, the shed, and to our storage unit. Since we will be tiling the first-floor bathroom (so it doesn’t need to be stained), we put the table saw and a few other very heavy things there. I even sawed off the little nubbins of rebar sticking out of the slab from when I mis-measured ten years ago. Damn you, younger Greg! Finally we had the slab cleared and we could start cleaning it.

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A Song From Under the Floorboards

The view from below

Time to put in a real second floor, one that doesn’t have bits sticking out or weak spots that startle you when you walk on them, like the temporary plywood floor did. Temporary, as in it was only there for eight and a half years (!). Since the floor will be visible from below, between the joists, it has to look good on both sides, top and bottom. We had originally thought we would use a single layer of inch-and-a-half-thick planks, but none of the millwork places around here could do that unless we bought them knives for their milling machines, at a price of many hundreds of dollars. Instead, we decided to do the floor in two layers – a bottom layer of local aspen, the exact same stuff as we put up on the ceiling, and a top layer of local maple. Each layer is three-quarters of an inch thick, giving us the same total thickness as we had originally planned.

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