The Floor from Hell

Well most of you know Mark has taken on the enormous task of remodeling this house. It's going from 1,600 square feet to 4500 square feet. The floor has been my chore.

See the deal is that the floor is the ceiling for the dining room and the floor for the bedroom. I don't know a lot about construction but I will try to get my story straight. When he constructed this part of the house the thought was the bedroom floor would have a different floor besides these wide pine planks you see in the photos. But he decided he liked the looked of the wide planks so much he would keep it as the floor of the bedroom. The problem was (is) that he didn't use tongue and grove to put the ceiling/floor together so there were cracks bewtween the boards. Things could potentially fall in these cracks, breezes could come up, light, noises etc. So the cracks had to be sealed.

He researched and went round and round to find a way to seal the cracks. It had to be in such a way that whatever he used to seal the cracks would not fall into the room below. So he found an old way of doing it...with twine.

So he told me that you just get sisal twine and push it between the boards. Sounds easy enough,, right? Wrong. None of the cracks are uniform so you have to use three strand twine and use maybe one strand, maybe two, or maybe three. If that weren't bad enough you can't just push it in you have to use a chisel and a hammer to pound it in. It has to be an extremely tight fit.

So I spend about two weeks doing that..everyday. Bang bang bang all day and not in a good way.

Then we you are done with that you have to fill in all the nail holes, cracks and knots with wood putty. Another week or so of work. Then he had to sand. Lastly this morning he put glue in all the cracks on top of the twine and I swept wood dust in on top of it. I blew my nose probably ten times and I still have wood boogers.

Now he has to sand it all again and stain it but my job here is done for the time being...thank God!!