Do-it-yourself (DIY)

Apologies again to the audience of maybe 2 people who ever stumble across and read this blog and wonder if I am ever going to write anything else. What can I say...I've been busy trying to be a better employee, husband, father, and a do-it-yourself first (and last) time homebuilder. I hope there has been progress made in all areas; however, the home is the only one that you can really see true progress because it's measured in things completed and how close you are to the ultimate goal of moving in. I'm beginning to think that the moving in part is just going to be the closing of chapter one. OK, maybe more like volume one since I could, and arguably should have, written many chapters about everything that has been done, learned, done wrong, etc. over the last year when we started planning this endeavor.

Fast forward from December......We have the wiring finished, sheetrock hung, most walls painted (some multiple times), hardwood flooring laid, custom cabinetry built and installed, granite countertops installed, one bathroom nearly finished, and a toilet that is actually usable! Still much to be done, but it's getting there!

Now to the DIY topic as stated in the title of this entry. My wife and I wanted hardwood flooring in a large portion of our house. We were concerned about the cost of said flooring. We toiled about just installing carpet and then down the road replacing it with wood. Given the amount of money we are paying for this home, I just couldn't see choosing flooring that would be considered throw-away. It seemed smarter to pay a little more up front to get something that would last the lifetime of the home (or at least our lifetime) that had a single 1-time cost. Additionally, I have been wanting to do things as "green" as possible. I don't like the idea of trees being cut to build our house, which is something great about Satterwhite Log Homes because they harvest dead-standing timber for their logs. This led me to wanting to use reclaimed flooring for our house -- namely Longleaf pine (aka. Heart Pine). This is something that I believed was only available these days as reclaimed lumber since most Longleaf forests in the US have been decimated. I found a local small business who focuses on lumber reclaimation who had enough wood to do our floor. The cost was high, but fairly close to our budget, however we had some concerns about it. At about the same time, our general contractor, Robert Jean, had discovered a mill called Woods of Mission Timber in North Texas. They had fresh cut Longleaf pine flooring that he said was beautiful. So here is Todd's new line of thinking on green: Green is good -- if the cost isn't prohibitive to the alternative. At a savings of $1/square foot for a better end-result, I couldn't resist the fresh cut lumber. That's OK...don't worry, I found a way to make up for it. Instead of doing a traditional floor finish with a polyurethane sealant, I chose a completely green product with 0% VOC. It's called "Rubio Monocoat", and seems too good to be true. So much so that they claim that's something all their loyal customers thought the first time they discovered the product too. After a bit of research, I made the bold decision to buck the way 90% or more of people in the US finish their floors and ordered this product online from one of the two only distributors in the US. So that's the backstory to the flooring....

With the floors having been installed by us (with help from the brothers-in-law) previously, it was time to get them finished. Our contractor had gathered quotes for having a flooring contractor come in and sand and finish the floors. It was going to be $2.50/ft^2. That would be over $2,000! No thanks! Here's where DIY gets crazy. I decided I would sand the floor myself. How hard could it be? I started researching the process and discovered numerous references to how professionals do the job with a "drum sander". Each of these had remarks about how a novice could *destroy* your floor with a single mistake. That's comforting! These remarks appeared nearly every time I found "how-to" info on the web. This had me discouraged about my abilities to the point that I was looking for an alternative and "easier" way to do it. Apparently I'm not alone in this area since I found many recommendations for using a "square-buff" sander which is more forgiving to operator errors. So with my decision made on the easy-way, I solicited help from my compadre Peter. He was eager and willing to help with this because it was something he's never done....and Pete is always up for a challenge to learn something new which is why he's so successful. Saturday (3/7) was the start date, so of course on Thursday evening I was still looking around getting plans made. That's when I stumbled across a series of videos produced by Clarke, the company who makes these sanders that Home Depot rents. How great is it that in todays world of the Internet that a company has the brains to make a series of videos and throw them out on YouTube? It's mind-boggling when you think about how things have changed in the last 5 years due to the rapid evolution of the internet. So here I am watching this guy sand floors with the ever-so-dangerous drum sander on my laptop when I say to myself, "Hey, I could do that!" So, I send an email to Pete telling him to watch the videos too. Saturday morning arrives and I head to the Orange super-giant and small business killer that I despise yet spend countless dollars at to rent the beast of a sander. I walk up to the counter and tell Eddie the rental guy what I need and what I plan to do with it. He asks me if I have ever used one of these before. I replied, "No, but I've watched a video on the Internet." As the words came from my mouth, I realized how stupid I probably just sounded to 60+ year old Eddie the hardware know-it-all. He looks me square in the eye and states, "You know how easily you can DESTROY your floor with that thing don't you?!?!" I felt like Ralphie from the movie "A Christmas Story" being told, "You'll shoot your eye out kid!" Knowing that Ralphie nearly did shoot his eye out after getting his Daisy Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle near the end of the movie scared the hell out of me. Maybe Eddie the wearer of the orange vest really knew that I was incapable of imitating what I watched once in a series of 5 minute YouTube videos! So I just did what Ralphie did and insist I get what I wanted and would deal with the consequences of my actions later.

After building such amazing suspense over something as mundane as sanding a floor, like Mr. Miagi did with Daniel-son in teaching Karate through floor-sanding, I am going to just cut to the finish line. Sunday night rolls around and the floor is completely finished: sanded, oiled, the whole works. The ONLY problem we had was with the easy-to-use square buff sander. It snagged two boards and left chunks missing. They can be fixed with a little work. The evil drum sander worked flawlessly. I can certainly see how it could do major damage, but they've built it so DIY idiots like me can do nearly as good a job as the professionals. With Pete's free labor (I owe you big-time Pete!), the $300 for the oil and floor cleaner, the rental of the sanders and sanding belts, pads, etc. it came out to around $600 to finish the floor myself. Quite a DIY savings from the $2,000+ that was the alternative.