Nursery Update

Last week, the DDH finished up the nursery floor.

Here it is with two coats of poly:

Two coats.

 And then with three:

Three coats.

Here's a picture from a different angle once it was dry, without as much glare. It looks like a real wood floor, right? (I mean, it is a real wood floor. And IRL you can tell it wasn't professionally done. Not necessarily because of the DDH but because someone messed it up doing a bad refinish job in the past, and the DDH doesn't have the tools to fix their mistakes.)

Dry and finished!

The floor needs one last thing, however. In a few places, most notably this back corner, there is a gap between the end of the wood floor and the baseboards. It appears that when the floor was wood before, there was another piece of baseboard that covered up this gap. That piece was pulled up when they carpeted the floor. We decided to put it back in.

Gap.

 So we bought some baseboard pieces:

Long sticks.

 And used the DDH's miter saw:

Yay power tools!

To cut them to size, mitered to fit together at the corners.

Miter saw and boards--no action shots, sorry.

We measured everything about ten times:

Room measurements.

Measuring the board.

And did bunches of weird thought experiments to make sure we were cutting everything at the right angle so all the pieces would fit together properly.

In this picture, you can see the tiny tiny piece of board in the corner that indicates to us there used to be two pieces all the way around the room. We had to cut the piece that fit here longer, and then the DDH used his Dremel to shave it down so it nestled perfectly with that tiny nub.

Not yet fitting.

 We lined everything up (and it fit perfectly!) and nailed it down.

Baseboard.

More baseboard. Ignore the obvious disaster area in the hall.

Then we had to fix the doorway so there wasn't just a jagged piece of carpet jutting out over our nice refinished wood.

We had to trim out the carpet pad and part of the carpet strip (the board with nails in it that holds the carpet down around the edges) underneath the carpet, because it was too fat to fit the little strip we bought:

See the line between the unfinished and refinished wood?

Trimming the carpet.

Scraping up carpet strip.

You can buy metal strips designed for exactly this purpose at the hardware store. We had to trim ours down to fit the doorway, once again using the trusty Dremel (I'm not sure what tool would really be more appropriate for cutting metal, but luckily the DDH has some metal-cutting bits for the Dremel and it worked okay).

Fitting in place.

Then we just nailed it down, and ta-da! A nice clean doorway:

 

Doorway.

So now the floor is done. I'm at work right now (yes, on a Saturday morning, ugh), and the DDH just texted me a picture of a line taped on the wall (we're painting it half brown/half blue, remember). I'm not sure exactly what he plans to do while I'm gone today, but it looks like painting is the next step!

We're getting so much closer. It's a big relief to at least have the floor done. In a pinch, we could move T-Rex into a room with unpainted walls, but not one without a floor. This is a big relief, and I'm quite impressed with the DDH's DIY skillz. ^_^

Yay!