Next Big Project

It has been very cold so far this winter. This morning it was 3 degrees windchill. Too cold to work on siding so onto our next indoor project. Time to put the floor down in the office.

First thing this morning while Bill was mentally lining up our how to list I washed the floor with a Muriatic Acid solution. This really cleaned the floor and slightly etched the concrete for the adhesive to adhere better. The Previous Owner appears to have putting some type of finish over top the concrete so we need to do this step.

 Put a fan in to dry the floor as quickly as possible.

Adhesive was brought in to warm up. We have had the OSB panels in the office for a couple of weeks now. They need to be acclimatized to the room and we wanted to be sure they laid flat.

 Put down chalk lines to confirm which direction we want the panels to go and to see how square the room is.















Laid the OSB boards down to check to see how square they are to the chalk lines. So far so good. It looks as if it will be as easy as the DIY blogs we have read on this kind of flooring. You can tell the top left panel was the one on top of the stack of boards. It is impregnated with drywall dust. We will move it to the back corner in case after sanding it still has a white glow to it.

There will only be two tricky cuts. The rest of the cuts are just straight. The panels need to slip around both ends of the middle wall. After the mitered corners of the crown moulding these should be easy peasy for Bill to do.

Sure enough the cut is perfect. We put the cut side in first ans then lowered the full side. Got it down for making sure the cut was right, pulled back up for adhesive to go down, and then put back down without hitting the walls even once. We make a pretty good team.








Time for the adhesive to go down. As Bill would spread it I would glop the next amount of glue onto the floor. Uh, Bill at this rate this big bucket of glue will only last us through two panels. The directions say it should cover the entire floor.

 Switched to a smaller toothed trowel and now it will go as far as expected. Bill could be a modern art artist with his swirl patterns.

Really thought our days of schlepping rock by hand were over. But, we decided to put weight along the joints to be sure everything dries flat. This is overkill; none of the blogs we read said to do anything like this but we wanted to be overly cautious. We only laid one half the room this morning. We need to go help our Grandbaby, William, due in a few months. He needs Neena and Pa to help put a mural up in his bedroom. We will go back to this tomorrow, he is much more important than this floor.