It's official

Final certificate

It’s official, after more than 8 years of work the house is “done” and we have the final certificate from the council to prove it.

We purposely didn't keep track of our time because we reckoned it would add up to be a scary number.  However, I do know that we have:

• Moved every brick, by hand, at least 3 times. 
• Constructed around 22 square metres of leadlight.
• Hand sanded about 70 square metres of plasterboard.
• Used roughly 50 metres of copper plumbing pipe for things other than plumbing.
• Spent over $2,000 on screws, more than $500 on caulk and precisely $202 on sandpaper.

Admittedly, there are still a couple of small things to do, like strip and install 50 metres of cedar skirting board and make another four panes of leadlight - so the housewarming is yet to be scheduled. And after that? Well I think Louis L’Amour got it right when he said:

 

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. Yet that will be the beginning.”

 

  

Finished (sort of)

The guiding design principle all the way has been to create a building that appears to have its roots firmly in the 1900s.  Given that, there was no way a high gloss, super smooth plastic looking floor was going to be for us.  Besides, we've laid real floor boards not laminate or vinyl. 

 

When it comes to timber floors there seems to be two broad approaches to finishing.  Either you go for a finish that sits on the timber, a polyurethane for example, or something that soaks into the timber, like a tung oil.  Both approaches have their ups and downs.   We went with a tung oil as we liked that it results in a satin finish which is easily repaired and doesn't stick the boards together (called edge bonding).  There are also tung oil brands around that have far less nasty chemicals in them than most of the polyurethanes.

So, our couple of days finishing went like this:

1. Sand with 60 grit paper.
2. Followed by 80 grit.
3. Hand rub on a coat of tung oil.
4. Hand rub the tung oil off after 15 minutes.
5. Leave for a day, then repeat steps 3 and 4.
6. Do all this with lots of ventilation and don't walk on it for another day.

If it still looks good in 12 months I'll let you know the brand of oil we used.  In the meantime - we're really happy with it.

PS-the light project turned out pretty well too.

Beating the enemy - dust

The Rolls Royce of sanders

I had long concluded that when it came to sanding there was always going to be dust on the hanky when I blew my nose at the end of the day - even with the brilliant Dust-Be-Gone dust mask.

But all that changed on the weekend when I sanded the hardwood flooring in one of the upstairs' bedrooms with my Festool RS100CQ sander connected to the Festool CT26E dust extractor (which is a euphemism for "vacuum cleaner").

After a day of sanding, the hanky was clean - not a speck.  Now that's impressive.

You may ask: why sand an entire floor with a 1/3 sheet sander?  Well, two reasons:

1. We don't want every imperfection eradicated, if that were the case we'd use laminate flooring over a chipboard floor. No, we want a floor that has some character but no splinters.
2. For the cost of hiring a floor sander I purchased the the RS100CQ second hand. And as sanders go - it is the Rolls Royce.