Laying floor in Mudroom/Office

  I thought I'd show you a little bit about my part in laying hardwood floor.

 First of all, I dump the box out.  As you can see, the pieces come in all different lengths.

Now, see how the lengths of wood join together in the photo below.  You do not want those joints next to each other.  They always have to be staggered.  So what I do is measure how long the next piece of floor needs to be to fall a few inches short of the joint in the prior row, or a few inches past the joint in the prior row.  Make sense?  Probably not. (sigh)  You just cannot have the joints be in alignment or it won't look right. 

In this picture (below) you can see where the next piece of wood is going to go.  So I measure the length I need, then I go to the pile of wood pieces and find something that will work. And I always have to cut down the last piece in the row.  I do all of the sawing, and picking out wood pieces.  Dave stays on the floor and uses a special type of hardwood floor nail gun and nails each strip down.  It works out a whole lot easier when you have one person on the floor and another one up.  Otherwise, you wear yourself out quickly getting up and down with every piece.

 We try to buy products made in the USA, but it's not always possible.

 

When I have a few moments of spare time, I make little notes on the sub floor!

 Here is a picture of what we finished on Sunday.  The floor is completely finished in the mudroom/office area.

On Monday and Tuesday he installed the doors. 

 

That little nook is my office area. 

I finished painting all of the trim.  Hopefully I will be moving a desk into this area this weekend.  I will have a real office area!

Cindy

The mud room and office area

I realize it's been awhile.  I didn't realize it's been this long!  I get so behind because when the work on the house is plumbing, wiring, insulating, heat ducts, etc...behind the scenes stuff, it all starts to look the same.  Even to me.

Remember the last post, about my kitchen, when I said I had to men sitting at my table giving me ideas about my new kitchen.  I was proud to have them at my table. I asked their mom, my cousin Gloria, to send me a picture of them all dressed up. Here ya go!  I'm so proud of them.  And, about the kitchen...well Gloria came over again and I showed her another idea.  Oh Lordy people, I'm changing some plans already!  I knew I would, which is why I started planning the kitchen early on.  I'll show you that later....

 Right now I'm going to show you what we've been up to the last month.  Take a walk with me down the foyer.

 Into the cardboard wall/door!

 Dave had to put up a cardboard wall so he could run a space heater.  We have the insulation finished, but it's been in the 20's here (Fahrenheit), and with no heat and no walls up dividing the rooms, he had to make some cardboard walls.  As you can see the electrical is finished in the mud/office room.

 We've had to change our plans in this room quite a bit.  As a matter of fact, most of it was figure it out as you go!  The big space you see here is where a desk will go. 

 We put in a couple of outlets...and had to think if we were going to need future outlets for other office stuff.  Things change so quickly with computers and such, and since it's an office area, we'll probably have a router, computer, printer, phone charger, ipad charger, and lamp.  I actually figured up what all we had plugged in now....and it's all that plus a desktop that gets used now and then.

 The reason we had to plan as we go, is because the chase area was way too small to fit everything in it.  This duct work is actually coming up through a closet. 

 So we turned what was going to be one long closet, into two shorter ones.

 And Dave lowered the ceiling to add a bulkhead which is holding more duct work.  (cold air return)

 See it in the picture below.  It's the area above the space.  No one will ever know what's inside all of this when the walls are finished, but my goodness there is a lot of 'stuff' that goes on behind those walls!

 Cold air return leads out into the foyer.  Not my choice, but it is what it is....

Here is a picture of the finished room.  We have three coat closets in this room.  One on the end, then two on the right hand side of the picture.  On this end is the desk area.

 

Closer pic of the closets.  

 
So this is one room that has gotten finished in the last month.........

There are a couple of things I'd like to say.  First of all to Kirsty from Rural Retreat Restoration blog.  I'm sorry to take so long to answer your questions.  I thought I would answer them here, because they are all a part of building a house here in Indiana.

In the country building a house is a little more relaxed than in town.  We do have codes to follow with electrical and heat and plumbing and such, but there aren't inspections in the country like there are in town.  And if you live in an historic district in town, there are more codes to follow than normal. 

Secondly, there is one thing that we had to do from the beginning and that is to determine if the land we bought was a "subdivided property" or a "legal lot of record."   If the original land has been divided off, then it is called a "subdivided property".  If it was subdivided, then houses are not supposed to be built on it without getting government permission.  Meetings need to be attended and neighbors need to be notified.  A Legal lot of record land is less of a hassle.  Even though our land was subdivided, the original house was on our property, which deemed it a Legal lot of record, so we were fortunate.

And thirdly, we did have to get permits.  A permit to build, a permit for a septic system, and had the driveway not already been here, we would have had to get a driveway permit.  All of them cost money. On a side note, the septic system is governmental ruled.  We had to get a list of soil inspectors and septic installers from "the board of health."  From that list we had to have our soil inspected, and the slope of the ground tested, to see what type of septic system could be installed.  They cost anywhere from around $6000 to $30,000.00 depending on how the soil inspection goes.  We had this done before we bought the property because there have been stories of people buying acres of land and not being able to afford a septic system or not be approved for one.  We had a neighbor out here who lost their house to a fire, and could not re-build on their land because the septic system could not be approved.  The rules have changed to many homes since the original septic systems were installed.  It's got to do with pollution to our land and water with original septic systems.

I hope that answers your questions, and I hope you can get your cottage restored!  A year is a long time to wait.

Cindy