girl projects vs. boy projects

Sorry I haven't been blogging much lately. Things are still busy on the farm. The kids continue to have a vibrant social life, which in turn means that I have none.

And, I started a project. A "linda" project. When I went to open the cabin, more floor tiles (slightly ugly, true linoleum) had removed themselves. I had already had difficulty keeping the floor clean last year because of the lifted tiles. So, being me, I decided to lift all the tiles. I thought that a smoothly painted subfloor would be a better option than the horrible broken/lifted tiles.

Now, 6 weeks (at least. Maybe more) later I am almost to the end of this lifting task. See, when this cabin was built originally, it was built well. So the person who put down the tile had done a good job. Curse him. The tiles that were lifting were due to the people who have had the cabin for the last while that didn't take care of it. Anywhere that the floor was wet the tiles had partially lifted.

Where the tiles are dry, they remain stuck to the floor. And linoleum tile does not remove easily once stuck. If you are especially deft with a putty knife, you might be able to lift part of the edges of the tile. But then the thing will break, and you'll never get that putty knife under the whole tile again.

So, the tough top surface (the actual flax product) chips off. You're left with black tarpaper type stuff on the subfloor. This is too thick to scrape and it will gum up your tools. Sanding is not an option, since the sandpaper would gum up.

Well, my mind doesn't stagnate in the home. I took an old iron (actually, it came with the cabin) and started melting off the tarpaper. It works remarkably well - so well that I have since purchased another ten dollar iron to continue my work. After a few minutes on "linen", it is possible to take a giant razor blade and scrape the subfloor until it is clear of crud. Well, mostly. The adhesive is still kind of there.

Then you wash the floor, which is extremely challenging when you have no water. It must be boiling water that you wash with, and that will melt the adhesive long enough for you to mop it into a bucket. It smells really awful.

However, I am almost done. I was thinking of painting this weekend. So before I left for the lake today, I had asked Dale to come out and maybe we'd look at removing the game cabinet that was in the cabin and take down some inner cladding that was still wet and moldy. The roof is on the things to do list this year too.

Dale brought his wrecking bar, his skilsaw, his rotary tool (just in case we had to replace bits of subfloor.) He took down the wall. We only have to replace the two stub walls and some studs beside the fireplace and a few roofing boards. Not as scary as we thought it might be.

Now this is when Dale started his project. He started to take apart the cabinet. I had tried with a little rubber mallet to no effect. He went full bore at the thing with the wrecking bar. About half an hour later, he was almost done - only two side pieces to go. After commenting on the love of iron that the builders seemed to have, he started kicking the sides of the cabinet. Did I mention that the original owners used this cabinet to store liquor?

The side pieces didn't budge.

At all.

So, out came the skilsaw. He would cut through the subfloor to expose the joists, which these side pieces seemed to be attached to. The rotary tool was intended to cut at the wall, since the subfloor was actually underneath the wall studs themselves.

He burnt out the motor on the rotary tool.

The next thing I know, the chainsaw is running inside my cabin. And soon, I have a 4' square hole in my floor.

And that almost finished my job. Because paint won't cover a 4' hole. So, I get to wait for a bit until he has time to make me a new bit of subfloor, then we'll putty it, then put some proboard over the whole place. No painting.

But, of course, we can't do that until the roof is fixed...

We put a little piece of plywood over the hole in the floor to keep the bugs out, by the way. However, I don't think we'll be able to have visitors yet!