The lovely wife made a killer made-from-scratch yule log. 100% hand made and edible:
One of the eyesores of Leviathan Hall was the terrible carpet in the sitting room off the master. Hardwood flooring was the answer.
The carpet was dated and worn out before we moved in. Both the two and four legged animals thoroughly ravaged the remains.
Carpet is removed to get down to the wood floor. After a brief flirtation with the idea of stripping the floor down to bare wood, I had strong recollections of the work, dust, and disappointment of my last attempt at doing this kind of thing and resolve to stay the course with replacement.
Of course, before I put the new floors in, I needed to repair baseboards and repaint. Once I painted the baseboards, I had to then paint the door trim and doors. After that, I removed that unused outlet box in the wall.
The paint patch on the wall highlighted the scuffs and dings, so a quick repaint on the wall was in order. My colorblindness really got me on this one. I was painting areas that had been scuffed or dinged. What I did not realize immediately was that the closet and sitting weren’t actually the same colors. All my patching and coverup in the closet was actually painting a different color. I did the painting at night and nothing seemed amiss with the wet paint. The next morning, even my colorblind eyes thought something looked off. A quick color consultation with my daughter confirmed that I had inadvertently signed myself up to paint the entire closet area. Not on the original schedule, but too late to back the train up.
Of course, once I did all that, I went ahead and replaced the ceiling fan with a newer light/fan combo. And, because I want to see as much of the new floors as possible, I wall mounted the TV and ran an outlet it to avoid having to deal with visible power cords.
All the back and forth on the floor made me realize this was my chance to work out some of the squeaks and creeks. This ended up being a little bit like a game of whack-a-mole. The squeak would often travel a little farther down the line rather than actually being eliminated. The main walkway area basically ending up getting screwed down the whole length of the room along a couple joists.
All of these side quests made for a lengthy sidebar, but if left undone, would have been the things that caught the eye instead of the nice new wood flooring.
Once I was ready to actually get back to addressing the floor, the first step was laying a silicone underlayment. I’m not sure it was strictly needed on this second floor installation, but was well worth the purchase price and effort to have a really clean and easy to work with surface. 10/10 would recommend. The old underlayment and floor were pretty dirty, so having a clean surface was quite nice. The silicone made sliding the boards into place easier as well.
Installing the new floorboards was the easiest part of the entire project for me. With my prep work done, it was largely an exercise in mixing in different lengths from different boxes. The pre-finished wood was mostly straight and the finish seems pretty good.
Nothing fancy required. I decided to turn the corner going into the closet. I had deliberately picked the longest runs for the sitting room, so going 90 degrees into the closets made sense. The excess of shorter pieces would not look too awkward going into the deep but relatively narrow runs of the closets.
The break into the closet area came out nicely. I needed to modify one board by trimming the width slightly and also make it a double grooved board. A few minutes with a table saw did the trick.
Finished product came out nicely.
I had previously made a combo insert to get Splendor and Splendor Duel in the same box. Post [here]. It was functional, but I didn’t really care for the way it looked. The laser cutter makes a really straight square line, but also shrinks the foam a little bit from the heat. The cut edges are just not very attractive.
A little dissatisfied with my results, I tinkered around and came up with a slightly improved version. I used relatively lightweight foam for the large spacer, and redesigned the spacer for the Noble cards to hold the cards in place. I also moved the alignment of the “bays” around for a more balanced look. The biggest improvement is probably a top plate that hides most of the cut edges. Gives it a more finished look.
Just a quick test of cutting a fancy cover on an existing book. This was a willing donor from the Little Free Library out front:
At our house, we like Splendor and Splendor Duel. Splendor has quite of bit of extra space inside the box, so I wanted to consolidate both Splendor games into a single box.
A little cardboard prototyping:
I used my laser cutter with good results. The foam core of the foamcore boards shrank a bit from the heat of the laser. If I build another version of this one, I will experiment with very low power and repeated passes to see if it makes a difference.
I used plain white cardboard as risers so everything would sit flush in the box and prevent pieces from rattling around.
I also cut the plastic card holder out of the original Splendor insert so I didn’t have to make a new one.
