In retrospect, I wasn’t ready to start this project. Before I build any furniture, I go over every step of the process in my mind. I try to predict what problems I’ll inevitably run into and come up with several different ways to solve them. That way I can develop a realistic project plan in terms of materials, budget, and time. I did that with the kitchen remodel last year and was able to pretty much stick to the plan. This project was different. The whole thing just sort of happened. I put together a rough plan, but it wasn’t very well thought out. As a result, it took longer and cost more money than I had hoped.

To see the phases of our remodel, and to learn from our many mistakes, browse through the following posts:

• Bathroom Remodel 1: The Plan
• Bathroom Remodel 2: It Begins
• Bathroom Remodel 3: The Hard Work
• Bathroom Remodel 4: Progress
• Bathroom Remodel 5: Tile
• Bathroom Remodel 6: Almost Finished
• Bathroom Remodel 7: Finished

We pretty much started our bathroom remodel on Saturday, July 10 and officially finished on August 8. We were without a toilet for three days. The rest of the time, we had a functioning bathroom. More or less. We spent about $700 more than we had planned due to some unforeseen plumbing issues. Actually, they were technically foreseen but not entirely understood. Plumbing issues are expensive issues. What really dragged out the process was my slow progress with the drywall work. I hate working with drywall.

The guy also came one morning to refinish the cast iron tub. It looks so pristine white that the glare almost hurts your eyes.

After work throughout the week, I managed to touch up the drywall mud on the ceiling and walls above the tile. On Sunday, the wife painted the walls and ceiling. She was careful not to let any paint splatter on our new floor and walls.

This is what the finished room looks like.

I still have a few places on the walls that need spackling. I’ll take care of that and the accompanying spot-painting after work this week.

Now that most of the room is adorned with varying shades of white, the towels, bathmat and shower curtain look terrible. Regular readers will remember that a green dishtowel mysteriously infiltrated our laundry and bled onto all of our bathroom linens. As a result, everything has a greenish-yellow tint. So the wife is planning to buy all new accessories for the room, which for some reason that’s only apparent to her means we also need to buy a new stainless steel shower caddy and curtain rod. But hey, what do I know about these things? Apparently it’s a package deal.

UPDATE: You can review the whole project here: Chronicles of a DIY Bathroom Remodel

The other pieces went up with relative ease. There was just enough room behind the toilet tank to slide the beadboard in place.

Next, I reinstalled the light fixture. It turns out my new wiring was successful. It looks much better now that it’s inverted and mounted higher up the wall.

Next, I had the wife drop a plumb line from the center of the light so I could properly center the vanity and medicine cabinet. Since the top of the medicine cabinet will stick out from the plaster wall a quarter inch or so, the wife painted the area behind it with the gray paint. She got a little carried away. This gave us our first real preview of what the finished room will look like.

After the upper and lower cabinets were attached to the wall, I cut and installed the baseboards. I also switched out the old off-white outlet for a pure white one.

We decided to put a small ledger on the top of the beadboard to cover the seam and add decoration. I bought some molding to accent the joint and the wife picked out a router bit she liked for the cut of the ledger overhang. She decided to just do a simple 45° angle halfway down the edge. I cut and installed it. It came out really good.

Here’s what the room looked like after caulking all the seams and gaps and mudding over the many nail holes.

To recap, here’s where we are in regards to the plan:

• Remove everything that’s not necessary or nailed down
• Scrape the walls and ceiling
• Skim coat the walls
• Patch the ceiling
• Remove the old tile (down to the studs)
• Remove the sink and vanity
• Prime and install the new beadboard
• Remove the toilet
• Tile work done
• Install a new toilet (x2)
• Prime the walls and ceiling
• Paint the walls and ceiling
• Buy and install a new sink
• Return everything to the room
• Bathtub refinished

I still need to finish smoothing the mudwork on the walls above the shower tile. When that’s finished, we’ll paint everything and rehang the accessories like the towel racks and wall clock. As far as I’m concerned, all of that work is cosmetic. What’s important is that we finally have a working bathroom again. There’s a tiny leak in the sink plumbing, but it’s nothing I can’t fix one afternoon after work.

I’ll admit to one problem I have with the room. I measured the height of the shower tile on the wall closest to the doorway. Apparently, the floor drops 3/4 of an inch from the front to the back of the room. I’m not really surprised. The old tile weighed a ton. As a result, the beadboard on the left side of the window is slightly higher than the tile on the right side. Our window blinds provide horizontal lines that accentuate the error.

What makes me mad about this is that I didn’t do anything wrong and it still came out a little messed up. Should I have foreseen this and angled the beadboard downward toward the back of the room? Would the angled board have looked bad? I don’t know. I guess the grass is always greener…

UPDATE: Bathroom Remodel 7: Finished

We went with white subway tile on the shower walls.

All in all, we were without a toilet for the better part of three days.

I know there’s technically no difference between a motel and a hotel, but for whatever reason I’ve developed my own definition. If the door to my room opens to a hallway, it’s a hotel. If it opens to a breezeway, it’s a motel. Motels are a little sketchier in my opinion, but hey; if it saves a few bucks, I was willing to give it a try. After all, we were merely sleeping there. So on Tuesday night, we checked into the Savannah Suites motel. The rooms were only $35 per night.

While we waited for the manager to unlock the office, a girl asked us, “do you live around here?” I thought that was a little odd. Who (besides us) stays in a hotel/motel in their own town? The wife answered, “yes,’ and the girl told us about how her and her husband and their dog had been sharing a room there since February. She was waiting because she had left her bible in the office. Who takes a bible into a motel office? When we were finally allowed entry into the dank motel office, I overheard the guy in front of us boasting that he’d been there for four months and knew everybody. Apparently, we had wandered into a pit stop for tramps and transients. It was like a hostel, but without the charm of adventurous youth. Our room reeked of equal parts depression, desperation and depravity. The broken table leg seemed to epitomize how everything there was just a little off.

Since we were officially slumming it, I thought we’d fit in better with the locals by drinking wine out of the always-elegant, and sometimes romantic, plastic wine goblets. If only we’d had some Boone’s Farm or Thunderbird, we’d have fit right in.

There was a funky smell in the room that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The wife walked around all bundled up in layers because she had convinced herself there were hidden cameras in one or more of the vents. I didn’t notice because I was busy waging a TV volume war with the guy on the other side of the wall. We eventually fell asleep to the reassuring flicker of the cheap bathroom light. At one point during the night, I woke up and figured out what the puzzling smell was. It was the acrid odor of old vomit. Needless to say, we didn’t spend another night in the Savannah Suites motel.

We stayed at a nearby Days Inn the next two nights. To my satisfaction, our door opened to a hallway. The wife got to hang out by the pool while I was busy hanging the sheetrock over the cement board in the shower back at the house. It was pretty nice at $45 per night. But then again, I’m easily seduced by free breakfast. The only drawback was that, even though the room was clean, the maid had not noticed a large pair of white underwear hanging on the towel hook behind the bathroom door. If I hadn’t been alert, I might have had a moment like the bathroom scene from Planes, Trains and Automobiles. After being reassured by the wife that she wasn’t cheating on me with an overweight gym teacher, I carefully removed them from the door and tossed them in the trash.

On Friday after work, we finally installed our new toilet. It felt good to finally have a functioning bathroom again. We bought the Glacier Bay HET ($100) to save a little money, but I didn’t care as long as it worked.

I have a personal motto that I’ve been living by for many years now: “You can do it right, or you can do it twice.” After the wife and I realized that it took three to five turns of the knob to properly flush our high-efficiency toilet, we called Home Depot to see if it’s possible to return a commode that’s been used. To our surprise, the customer service guy replied, “just clean it and box it up as best you can.” So we stashed away our toilet and our shame and went back to the store.

After installing the Consumer Reports-recommended American Standard Champion 4 ($230), we once again had a functioning bathroom.

To recap, here’s where we are in regards to the plan:

• Remove everything that’s not necessary or nailed down
• Scrape the walls and ceiling
• Skim coat the walls
• Patch the ceiling
• Remove the old tile (down to the studs)
• Remove the sink and vanity
• Prime and install the new beadboard
• Remove the toilet
• Tile work done
• Install a new toilet (x2)
• Prime the walls and ceiling
• Paint the walls and ceiling
• Buy and install a new sink
• Return everything to the room
• Bathtub refinished

After two hotels and two toilet installations, my motto is truer than ever.

UPDATE: Bathroom Remodel 6: Almost Finished

Before work on Tuesday morning, I removed the only toilet in our tiny house.

I ended my last post by sayaing, “I’ve had a bad feeling about this project from the beginning. So far, every step forward has resulted in another step back. I don’t really mind that as long as it means more work instead of more money. Still, I’ve been expecting bad news and I’m afraid I’m going to get it over the next few days.” I was right. I met the tile guy on Tuesday morning at about 8:30 am. He said he couldn’t do anything to the shower walls until a plumber comes in to fix the faucet drip and re-pipe everything. He agreed to come back the next morning. I finally got a plumber to the house at 4:00 pm and he agreed to do the work the following morning. I arranged with the tile guys to come after lunchtime so they wouldn’t be in the plumber’s way. As a result, all they had time to do was put the cement board in along the walls and floor. That pushed the entire project back at least a day.

After a long day of work on Wednesday, I decided it would be best for me to patch the walls above the shower area so the tile guys’ thinset will fill any gaps along the bottom seam. It looks simple, right? It’s not. To begin, I had get the wife to help me snap chalk lines 18 inches above the cement board.

Since there’s no way to really score the plaster (and the cement board behind it) in a way that makes it easy to snap off, I carefully set the depth on my circular saw and cut as straight a line as I could. This threw an amazing amount of dust in the air. I had to stop cutting a couple of times to let the dust settle because I couldn’t see anything at all. At one point I actually pressed my mouth up against the window screen so I could breath a little fresh air. The neighbors must think I’m some kind of freak. I finished making my cuts with my new Dremel Multi-Max and very carefully removed the old plaster and nails.

As I’ve mentioned before, nothing is square or plumb in my house. Moreover, the thickness of the plaster varies every few inches, sometimes dramatically. In order to hang 1/2 inch sheetrock and have the surface be flush with the existing plasterboard, I had to custom cut shims for each individual stud. I would lay the new sheetrock into the space and use my carpenter’s square to get a proper depth measurement. Even with that kind of attention to detail, the seam still comes out uneven in some places. There’s really not much you can do but accept the fact that you’ll be spending all of your available free time over the next few days applying and sanding drywall mud. I learned to accept that sad fact during the kitchen remodel last summer.

When all the new sheetrock was hung, I put on the corner bead and taped the joints. Unfortunately, I only had enough mud on hand to do about a third of the project. Since it was 11:00 pm, I decided to just call it a night. The tile guys come on Thursday morning to lay the tile. They grout on Friday morning and then the plumber comes back to install our new shower fixtures. Most importantly, the new toilet goes in on Friday afternoon. It’s only been a couple of days, but I’m already sick of roughing it. I could never make it in the third world.

To recap, here’s where we are in regards to the plan:

• Remove everything that’s not necessary or nailed down
• Scrape the walls and ceiling
• Skim coat the walls
• Patch the ceiling
• Remove the old tile (down to the studs)
• Remove the sink and vanity
• Prime and install the new beadboard
• Remove the toilet
• Tile work done
• Install a new toilet
• Prime the walls and ceiling
• Paint the walls and ceiling
• Buy and install a new sink
• Return everything to the room
• Bathtub refinished

UPDATE: Bathroom Remodel 5: Tile

We’re planning to run the new bead board as high as the tile in the shower, which is about six feet tall. That will leave about two feet of wall space between the bead board and the ceiling. Although I tried to talk myself out of it all morning, I decided the light fixture needed to be moved to the center of that space. I got out my keyhole saw and electrical tools and took care of it. It’s a little extra work, but it’ll look better when it’s done. I learned that lesson from the ceiling fan fiasco during the kitchen remodel.

The part of the job I’ve been dreading is the tile demolition. If this was a modern house with modern building methods, it wouldn’t be so bad. But my walls are not sheetrock; they’re plasterboard. That means there are horizontal rows of gravelly backer board throughout the house. On top of the backer board is 3/8 inch thick plaster. Whenever I hang a picture in my house, I have to pre-drill a hole, insert an anchor, and pray that a crack doesn’t form. As annoying as that is, it’s nothing compared to the way the tile is installed in the bathroom. The workers nailed a sheet of steel mesh directly to the studs. On top of that mesh, they applied an inch of plaster cement and capped it with porcelain tiles. What is the point of this? A bomb could go off in the tub and the shrapnel wouldn’t make it through the wall to the bedroom. Look how thick this stuff is, and this isn’t counting the cement that oozed through the mesh.

The only way to remove the tile is to beat it into submission with an eight-pound sledge hammer. I had to rear back, being careful not to shatter my toilet, and hit the wall hard enough to crack the tile but not go through the entire wall. The last thing I need is to have a hole in my exterior wall or crack the plaster in my bedroom.

This process was grueling. I laid a thick blanket in the tub to protect the cast iron. After knocking off some tiles, I had to pick up the pieces with my hands. I could only fill a box with so much debris or else I couldn’t carry it to the front yard and empty it into a wheelbarrow. This stuff is so heavy that I’m amazed the floor hasn’t caved in. After the tiles were off, I bashed the cement until it crumbled into a million tiny pieces. I son discovered that you can’t really pry the mesh off the wall. Anytime you find a spot to use levergae, the tool rips through the mesh. The best way to do it is to rip gashes in the mesh between the studs with the pointed end of a three-pound hammer. Then you pull on the mesh with your hands and a small pry bar. After much toiling, you get this.

After hours of work and dozens of cuts (and maybe a few tears), I finally saw some progress. I measured success by the fact that the window didn’t shatter during my belligerent assault. Such success was tempered by my disappointment in the damage I did to the wall above the tile. I scored the seam with a utility knife before pounding away, but that didn’t do anything. Now I’ll have to remove about 18″ of plasterboard from above the tile area and replace it with sheetrock after the new tiles go up.

I only did two walls. I was afraid I’d damage the plumbing on the third wall, so I’m going to pay my tile guy to do it. He has more experience with this process than me. I put in new insulation and tacked up some plastic over the bare studs so we can still shower.

The wife is going to try to prime the ceiling and upper walls today so I can see where my mud work is subpar. Tomorrow morning, the toilet comes out and the tile guy shows up. To recap, here’s where we are in regards to the plan:

• Remove everything that’s not necessary or nailed down
• Scrape the walls and ceiling
• Skim coat the walls
• Patch the ceiling
• Remove the old tile (down to the studs)
• Remove the sink and vanity
• Prime and install the new beadboard
• Remove the toilet
• Tile work done
• Install a new toilet
• Prime the walls and ceiling
• Paint the walls and ceiling
• Buy and install a new sink
• Return everything to the room
• Bathtub refinished

I’ve had a bad feeling about this project from the beginning. So far, every step forward has resulted in another step back. I don’t really mind that as long as it means more work instead of more money. Still, I’ve been expecting bad news and I’m afraid I’m going to get it over the next few days.

UPDATE: Bathroom Remodel 4: Progress

Finally, the mud work began. As I’ve written many times on this blog, I hate doing mud work. I’ve gotten better at it, but that doesn’t make it pleasant.

It’s not putting on the mud that’s so dreadful; it’s the sanding. To minimize the dust in the house, I had to do it with the bathroom door closed. If I wear a breathing mask, I can’t wear my glasses or they’ll fog up. It’s just as well because they get so coated with white dust that I can’t see anything anyway. This is how thick it comes down.

After sanding, I had to put on another coat of mud, let it dry, sand it down, and repeat as many times as necessary to get a smooth finish. And since I have a single-bathroom house, I couldn’t shower in between stages. I don’t know how, but I managed to get the room (and myself) cleaned before the wife got home.

I hoped that I could scrape the crack in the ceiling and patch it with tape and mud over it. But when I starting taking off the plaster, I saw how damaged the area was. I quickly realized that I needed to cut out the cancer.

Fortunately, I had some spare drywall in the garage. Unfortunately, modern drywall is nowhere near the thickness of 50-year-old plasterboard. That meant I had to shim the ceiling joists to level the insert. As annoying as that was, it wasn’t nearly as annoying as what was about to happen. We have loose (non-asbestos) insulation in the attic. Since the pitch of the roof is so mild, I couldn’t reach all the way into the narrow corner to remove the insulation above the cracked plaster. That meant I had to cut out the ceiling and let it fall all over me. I itched for days.

It took some time, but I cut shims for the ceiling and got the new drywall installed fairly flush with he existing surface. I put some tape and a rough coat of mud on the joint, but I didn’t get a chance to sand it because we’ve been entertaining guests for the past couple of days. It was nice to take some time off.

To recap, here’s where we are in regards to the plan:

• Remove everything that’s not necessary or nailed down
• Scrape the walls and ceiling
• Skim coat the walls
• Patch the ceiling
• Remove the old tile (down to the studs)
• Remove the sink and vanity
• Prime and install the new beadboard
• Remove the toilet
• Tile work done
• Install a new toilet
• Prime the walls and ceiling
• Paint the walls and ceiling
• Buy and install a new sink
• Return everything to the room
• Bathtub refinished

The tile guys come on Tuesday. That means we have all weekend to finish the mud work, remove the sink and vanity, demo the tile, and hang the new bead board. It would be nice if we could prime the walls and ceiling, but that’s a lot to do in one weekend. The way these old houses were constructed, it’s going to be tiring and time consuming just to get the tile and backer board/grate off the walls in the first place.

UPDATE: Bathroom Remodel 3: The Hard Work

I can’t really blame the former owners for wanting to spend as little as possible on a house they were preparing to leave, but I would have been too embarrassed to attach my name to such shoddy craftsmanship. For example, fake wainscoting graces the lower part of the walls. They could have bought real bead board for a few dollars more, but they took the cheap route so they wouldn’t have to cut it. This is emblematic of most of their work on the house. Whoever cut the bead board messed up the math and missed the outlet. A bad patch job covers over their mistake. An off-white outlet on a pure white wall accentuates the error. Ironically, they could have hidden the mistake with wood filler if they had used real bead board.

The bathroom vanity is cheap, but nice-looking. The sink neither matches nor fits the base. I’m guessing they got it for next to nothing because the porcelain was chipped. We moved the light fixture to the kitchen and replaced it with a nicer one, so that dilemma has already been addressed. The tub area has brownish-yellow tile that’s been cracked and caulked many times. When the previous owners reframed the closet door and window, they broke several tiles and glued them back on. That’s just lazy.

There used to be a built-in cabinet and mirror attached to the wall, and they just painted over the old glue and damaged plaster. The ceiling was worse. They mudded over cracks and holes and never sanded. They just painted it all with white wall paint. And they never reported (nor addressed) a leak in the roof that waterlogged and ate through the plaster. That’s illegal. Since we’ve owned the house, the crack has gotten bigger and finally started to open.

We recently got a free roof for the house and garage thanks to a 30 second hailstorm back around Easter. Once the leak was permanently fixed, we decided it was time to fix the ceiling. And since the bathroom is going to be covered in drywall dust anyway, I figure I’ll go ahead and put a skim coat of mud on the walls to smooth them out.

As usual, one domino knocks over the next and we’ve been out pricing tile for the shower area and floor. We ordered small, hexagonal black and white tile for the floor and six inch, white subway tiles for the bath tub area. I’ll put white bead board on the walls up to about five feet and we’ll paint the area above it light gray. The finished room should look bright and airy, which is important for a small, single bathroom house.

We’re hiring out the tile work. They show up on July 12th. Here’s the plan:

• Remove everything that’s not necessary or nailed down
• Scrape the walls and ceiling
• Skim coat the walls
• Patch the ceiling
• Remove the old tile (down to the studs)
• Remove the sink and vanity
• Prime and install the new beadboard
• Remove the toilet
• Tile work done
• Install a new toilet
• Prime the walls and ceiling
• Paint the walls and ceiling
• Buy and install a new sink
• Return everything to the room
• Bathtub refinished

There’s a local company that refinishes old cast-iron bathtubs. When we call them to come to our house, it means we’re done.

UPDATE: Bathroom Remodel 2: It Begins

After removing the old oak slats and replacing them with the salvaged pieces, the floor was a little creaky and uneven despite our best efforts. I added another 30 or so screws to the floorboards until I could step everywhere without the floor depressing more than it does in the rest of the house. Next, I filled all of the holes with oak-colored wood filler.

The only way to smooth out the slats was to sand them into submission with my belt sander. To make quick work of the job, I used a 60 grit belt. It was not only effective at flattening out the slats, but it also pulled every muscle in my body. I felt like a 90 pound girl trying to hold back a hyperactive great dane.

This process blew so much dust into the house that we had to do our Spring cleaning over again. But it really smoothed our the new floor.

Although the belt sander did its job, it left a very rough surface on the floor. After years of woodworking, I’ve come to learn that you need to wet the surface of the wood before you try to sand it to a fine finish. The water not only cleans the dust off, but also stands the grain upright. I’ve made several pieces of furniture that were as smooth as glass until I added a coat of stain. The liquid in the stain stood the grain up and gave me a relatively rough finish that had to be sanded back down, resulting in an uneven color. Another feature of wetting the oak is that you get a glimpse of what it’ll look like when it’s stained. This process revealed that some boards will be darker than I’d hoped.

After spending a couple of days out of town, I returned to finish the floor. I used my hand sander to smooth out the rough-finished slats. I went over and over them with 100 grit and then 150 grit paper. I finished it all up by hand sanding everything with a 220 grit sponge sander. There’s no substitute for using your hands to feel out and smooth the stubborn sections. This put even more dust into the house.

To prep for the stain, I wiped everything down with a damp towel another time. While the floor was drying, I went out to the garage to test Natural and Golden Oak stains on some unused slats. Neither the wife nor I could tell much of a difference between the two colors, so I mixed two parts natural to one part golden oak so that the filler would get a little tint. I put down the stain with an old remnant of a discarded white t-shirt (that’s all I ever use to stain things) and the wife worked behind me wiping the excess off. Fortunately, the color exactly matched the existing stain on boards that I accidentally sanded around the perimeter. Unfortunately, it resulted in a pretty dark color on some of the new wood. I knew this would happen, but it was a little disappointing nonetheless.

The color lightened a little as the stain dried, much to my satisfaction. Next I had to tackle the unfinished filler, which popped out of the wood like a thousand tiny eyeballs. I have a stain marker that’s made for coloring scratches in furniture.

The marker’s pointed tip worked perfectly for coloring the filler. Here’s a before and after picture. You have to strain to find the screw holes.

I’ve decided to wait a few days before I put a thin clear-coat on everything. I want the new slats to get a little worn and lighten up a little first. I might even sand the darker slats a little with my high-grit sponge. The polyurethane will darken it back up. Here’s how it looks now.

When I began this project, I wrote, “I think the reason I let this project linger for so long is because I knew that short of refinishing the floors in the entire house, there was no way I could make new hardwood properly blend in.” As I expected, the new slats look like a patch job. But at least the job was done correctly and it looks professional. It’s kind of charming in a way. Old houses have lots of quirks that give them character. This hardwood patch is yet another quirk. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

You may be wondering how you remove a wood slat from a floor that’s tied into the other pieces with tongue and groove and fastened to the subfloor with nails. The answer is, you do it very carefully.

Set your circular saw to be just barely deeper that the depth of the hardwood slats. You have to cut two parallel lines down the center of the slat and stop the saw just as the blade reaches the joint. Buy a new blade for this process and understand that you’ll slowly ruin it as you inevitably encounter and cut through nails, throwing hot sparks all over the place. Don’t worry about your walls and floor; the sparks only burn your skin (I didn’t realize how warped that rationalization was until I wrote it).

Once you’ve cut the parallel lines in your slat, you can lift and remove the center piece. Now that there’s a channel, you have room to wiggle the tongue side and groove side away from their adjacent pieces and remove them as well.

It’s a tedious process, but it’s not really that difficult. What’s difficult is removing the random nails that remain. (If you were trying to remove a piece of wood from the middle of a floor, you would use this same process, but you’d start by drilling a one inch hole in the middle of the slat and starting your saw cuts from there).

It’s less important that you cut all of the pieces completely, and more important that you stagger the ends. Some of my slats went deep into the bedrooms, so it made more sense to cut them off close to the old vent than to remove the whole pieces. Hence the staggered, almost stair-stepped ends.

Once all of the pieces were cut, I started laying the new slats into the existing holes. To my chagrin, I discovered that the new slats were not quite as thick as the replacements. This was preferable to the new ones being too thick, as I don’t own a planer, but it was a problem nonetheless. The margin was so small (about the thickness of a penny in most cases) that I couldn’t cut shims. The wood just disintegrated. To make matters worse, my subfloor is made up of wooden beams instead of plywood sheets. Some beams were higher than others, making my task even more complex. In some areas, I didn’t need any shims at all. In others, there was a sizable gap.

After a lot of thought, I decided there was only one way to adjust and control the height of the new slats as the subfloor constantly changed depths. My solution gives new meaning to the phrase, putting money into your house.

With wood glue and about three dollars worth of pennies (stacked two or three high in some places), the wife and I were able to cut and lay the new slats flush with the existing floor.

We knew we were almost finished when the only word left was “PROGRESS.”

Because the new slats don’t tie into the existing floor, I had to secure them individually. And since they weren’t flush with the subfloor, I couldn’t glue them (they were, however, glued to the pennies which were glued to the floor). I pre-drilled and inserted trim head screws along the slats to tie them down. I was careful to counter-sink them enough so that they won’t interfere if a future owner decides to refinish the floors.

This step was very rewarding. The next step is to fill the screw holes, sand the filler flush, and restore the wood to match the existing floor as best I can. I know it’ll always look like a patch until someone refinishes the floors in the whole house, but I’m hoping I can get it pretty close.

UPDATE: Patching A Hardwood Floor, Part 3