Once Upon A Staircase (Part 3)

Having applied a cushion for what would be my new upstairs hall flooring, I landed on a solution for the actual surface. You can read all about my inspiration HERE and HERE. It turns out that not all floors have to come in a box marked “Floor”! Our Foremothers had no Home Depot, after all: Early floors were simply planks of wood, laying side by side. And many of them have remained in place for generations.

So I borrowed a truck from work, and initiated Operation Lumberyard. I scored a pile of 1 x 6 pine planks for about the price of a sweater’s worth of cashmere. Drunk with the power of hauling boards in a Big-Boy truck, I commenced laying my new floor.

It was still raining, so I turned the dining room into my wood shop. I measured for each board, trotted down the stairs, and cut each one with my mitre saw. The saw had to be situated on the dining room floor because I don’t have a stand for it. Which meant that I was on my hands and knees for all but the trip between stories. While both stupid and brutal, this arrangement meant that I was accidentally getting into possibly the best physical shape of my life.

Lumberyard pine planks are by no means refined. They are knotty, scratched up, uneven and warpy. Which means that in attaching them to the floor, sometimes I found that two edges failed to meet attractively. In a couple of cases, I simply could not muscle the boards close enough together. At which point a lightbulb went off: What I needed wasn’t brute force but leverage.

Enter my Honda Civic’s tire jack. I screwed a scrap of plywood down to act as a cleat, then put the tire jack between it and the misbehaving board and voila! I was able to crank the jack and force the warped member into position beside its neighbor.

Take that, warped floorboard!

My assistant approves.

And here she is in all her naked glory: My new hall floor! The feel of it underfoot and the delicious fragrance of sawdust were more than enough compensation for my aching joints and strained muscles. Oh and if you’re wondering, I attached the boards to the subfloor/underlayment with a nail gun, flooring adhesive, and the tears of my enemies.

The sexy bit of trim on the edge of the floor here is known as “stair nose”, and proved to be hard to source in pine that would match the floor, but source it I did, HERE. Thanks, Internet!

I performed the same witchcraft below, on the stair return.

Now Pine planks are notoriously soft, and feet are notoriously hard. I decided to lean into the inevitable damage and pre-distress my pretty new floor. It was a bit like making wool felt from perfectly good knitting: intentional damage is counter-intuitive to me, but I knew it was the best way to go for my situation.

I used a meat tenderizer, metal file, hammer and all manner of hardware to beat the tar out of the entire thing. In light of my emotional state at the time, it was pretty cathartic. I *may* have imagined it was not the floor, but a certain someone, to whom I delivered the beatdown.

After that part, I wavered a little before pulling the trigger on a stain color. I don’t know of too many black wood floors, but what the hell: Nothing in Moderation. And I’m so happy I went for the gusto. It’s dramatic, and rustic, and completely my own. I hit it with two coats of Minwax stain in “True Black”, and then three coats of old-school oil based polyurethane in Satin Finish. Knowing that the polyurethane will turn amberish-yellowish over time was a good reason to choose black stain. I’ve had more than enough of orange wood in my life (I’m looking at you, ugly-ass oak kitchen cabinets).

In addition to the yellowing issue, oil based polyurethane is more expensive, smelly and difficult to clean up than water based alternatives. And in my opinion, totally worth the grief if you never want to finish flooring again, which, it turns out, I do not. Whether I chose well or poorly will be revealed in the fullness of time.

You can still see the knots and grain of the wood through the stain and poly. The fact that it’s all beat up anyway freed me from worry that my poly finish wouldn’t be factory-perfect. Newsflash: It’s not.

Here you can see that in spite of the fact that I laid the planks as tightly together as I could, some pretty respectable cracks opened up as they dried. I knew that would happen, and it bothers me not. I think it adds to the rustic quality. And considering the state of things when I started, the improvement is drastic.

Please join me for the next installment, in which I sew a wooden skirt!

Once Upon A Staircase (Part 2)

By the time I had painted the entire interior of my house, the stairs and hall were dry enough to be addressed. I had begun to break the project down into steps (no pun intended). My first assault was on the hall subfloor. It seemed pretty likely that I would end up cutting out and removing it entirely; a job I did not want to tackle. It would involve:

1. Making friends with my skill saw again, which I’ve only used one other time before and isn’t my most comfortable tool.

2. Living for an indefinite period with only exposed joists between me and the downstairs ceiling.

3. Somehow getting a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood to my house. My only vehicle is a Honda Civic, so I would have to beg/borrow/steal a truck, then manage to get said plywood home in the constant rain that is February in Fairview.

4. Wait for a break in the rain, drag my crappy table saw into the driveway and somehow muscle said plywood sheet into the appropriate shape(s). I dislike my table saw intensely because it is as I said, crappy, which means I have never been friends with it. It wobbles, shrieks and bucks, leading to very inaccurate cuts, and no small number of bad words.

5. Installing the new subfloor and probably waiting for it to dry again, knowing the likelihood of it and I getting caught in the rain at least once in the process.

So before resorting to all that noise, I decided to gamble $56 on a can full of hope:

I didn’t take any photos of painting the subfloor for some reason. I think crawling around on it to brush on the paint was such a nasty experience (eclipsed only be the act of removing the carpet) that I just wanted outta there between coats. It smells pretty heinous until it dries, and open windows in February are a known bummer where I live.

But open them I did, and paint it I did, all three coats. And ya know what? The universe must have taken pity on me, because it worked!

Fueled by success and coffee, I began Operation Underlayment. That’s what I called it then. I now lovingly refer to it as Operation Glue My Tiffany Bracelet To The Subfloor With Construction Adhesive.

What I know now, but didn’t then, is that construction adhesive is a lot like acrylic yarn: It’s hard to control and damn near impossible to get rid of. So even though I cleverly wore gloves, the adhesive somehow got up under the one covering my bracelet. In the process of trying to extricate myself from glue, underlayment, bracelet and floor, things went badly wrong. Fortunately I was able to get the adhesive off my jewelry before it solidified into an irremovable mass. Things didn’t go as well for my skin but hey, skin grows back and bracelets don’t. And before you say it, yes, I know it comes off with mineral spirits, which I even had on hand. But in this case, there was a definite window of time after which mineral spirits no longer worked on skin. Which, when I consoled myself with some beautiful hand dyed black yarn later that evening, stained my hands black. And my stained, I mean NOTHING I tried to remove it worked. Straight bleach, industrial oil remover, acetone, you name it I tried it. I had to wait until it wore off, some 8 days later. Heed my lesson, Gentle Readers: Never install felt underlayment without your opera gloves.

Ruby somehow avoided becoming permanently affixed to the floor by liquid nails.

Free at last! The dirty-looking spots on my new felt underlayment are the scene of the Bracelet Incident.

Here is the greatly-improved upstairs hall after I finished. At the bottom of this shot you can see the very beginning of my dreamy new wide plank floor. Yes, it’s unfinished. Turns out prefinished floorboards are about as affordable as a quiviut bedspread.

Watch this space for what happened next.

Once Upon A Staircase (Part 1)

Back when I posted about my staircase adventure, many of you asked me to tell you the story in more detail. In between that time and now, I remodeled my kitchen, so you could say I got a BIT sidetracked (DIY Mania, anyone?).

But I got the kitchen situation mostly buttoned up (more on that later), so now it’s time to backtrack and tell you all about the adventure I have come to call “The time a staircase ate my life”. Fair warning: This post contains graphic photos of desolated subfloor. It’s GROSS, so proceed at your own risk, Gentle Readers.

It was complete desperation that drove me to learn how to build a staircase. Disclaimer: I’m in no way confident that I did learn how. Like all my adventures, there’s a fine line between actual understanding and totally just making stuff up as I go.

My upstairs hall, post-carpet and pad removal.

You may recall that I moved out of my house for a year, from October 2019 to October 2020. After that, I returned and my children’s father moved out. During my absence, our beloved Bailey dog aged into what can only be described as total incontinence. I’m not sure what Phillip’s level of engagement or even realization of Bailey’s situation was, but the evidence was profound that something had gone badly wrong.

Which is, I hope, a polite way of saying that the 20-year old builder-grade (read: cheap n’ crappy) carpet in my upstairs hall and staircase was completely saturated with dog urine. The subfloor (again, cheap n’ crappy) beneath it had acted as a sponge, which in turn mildewed. So between the carpet, the pad, and the subfloor, my welcome back home was clouded by the literal stench of neglect. My eyes watered, my throat hurt, and my heart broke under the weight of the potential agony and expense of repairing it all.

Removing unspeakable nastiness, one tread at a time. That lump toward the back of the naked lower step is disintegrated carpet pad, seized to the tread by, um, moisture, and awaiting hand-scraping. Rusted nails and staples imbedded at no extra charge!

The great thing about total disasters is that once you get over the shock of them, you can see that there’s nowhere to go but up. Particularly when starting at the literal bottom, as I was in this photo.

The smell of my staircase was so appalling that I had to address it before I even finished unpacking. Armed with goggles, gloves and face mask, I tore out the carpet, pad, staples, tack strips and nails, inch by revolting inch. It turns out that carpet pad which has disintegrated and then soaked in urine will fuse to the subfloor in what can only be described as “foam-crete”. I’ll spare you any further description, but it was certainly a borderline hazmat situation.

Ruby surveys the damage on the landing.

Having narrowly survived the demolition of the upper layers, I retreated to my knitting chair while I waited for the subfloor to dry. There may also have been a recovery period for my hands, knees and back. The stench created by the carpet and pad abated immediately, leaving only the unfortunate visuals you see here, and the residual terror over what to do next. It was satisfying, though, to have proved again that there is no substitute in such situations for just doing something, even if it’s wrong.

Dangling by my toenails, two stories up. Can you tell by my expression that I was terrified?

The Something that I did next was to paint the upstairs hall and stairway a fresh and becoming shade of pale shell pink. Never one to exercise restraint, I went on to cover every wall of the interior with it over the course of the next weeks while I investigated options for how to address my ruined stairs and hall.

The Pinkwashing of all 1500 square feet of my house, while exhausting, was cathartic. I came to see it as a giant eraser taken to the scene of profound sadness. As a creature painfully sensitive to physical space, I desperately needed the immediate comfort fresh paint provides. Why pink? Well, why not? I love it. Pink is my new white. And it doesn’t hurt that my ex would have vetoed it, had he been consulted.

Next time: I address the simultaneous lack of budget and flooring material. Hilarity ensues.