Another adventure in home improvement! How many projects over how many years, will it take before we find something to do that doesn't have a super-steep learning curve? We finally had all of the materials needed for the studio floor. We thought, "No sweat! We can knock this baby out in a few hours!" Note to self: never think that!
Saturday morning, we saunter down to the studio area, in no big hurry, to lay a little cork floor. We have completed a number of other flooring projects in our time, and this looked to be one of the simpler kind. After all, we've put in a nail-down bamboo floor with compressors, and nail guns and table saws in multiple rooms! Ar-ar-argh!, as Tim-the-too-man Taylor
would say! Turned out stunning! This one was just a simple "click-in", glueless, nail-less, throw-it-on-the-floor-and-it-lays-itself-sort of floor in a single square room. Right. Well, putting down the underlayment wasn't too bad. We had the special tape and cut the jigs and jags with scissors.The cork comes in 3-sq-ft sections, with "click"-type tongue-in-groove engineering on the long sides. We heard they were a piece of cake. The first row goes down easy, looks fabulous. We'll be done by dinner! Time to start clicking. No matter how hard we tried, we could not get the pieces to lock together. We tried pushing it together from all angles. No dice. Big gap-osis!
Tom started pounding it with a hammer and woodblock to jam it in, with only modest success, but it looked like we were ruining the edges, that way. What's the deal? I ran upstairs to learn what I could from the internet and found, of course, that the kind we bought got great reviews for looks and wear, but very bad reviews for dyi installation. The comments I read (after expressing frustration) kept mentioning some kind of "bar" that seemed to help, though. So, Tom took off to the two large home improvement centers in town to find one. He came up empty, but they had heard of them, at least.We decided, as it was late afternoon, by then, to drive an hour to the closest Home Depot, so that, on Sunday, at least, we could start again with the right tools.
We found a "pull bar", as it's called--hurray!--and some spacers. This morning, we started again. Turns out, the bar is extremely helpful for the edge work, but not one bit useful for clicking the panels to each other, our biggest problem. After more trial and error, we finally figured out that if one of us stood on the joint while the other smacked it with a hammer-and-block in three different places, they clicked together. Amazing! So, that's what we did. There was a brief time, later, when we thought we hadn't bought enough flooring (we'd ordered only 9 extra sq ft, having measured the room incorrectly).
But, by the end of the day, we not only had gotten much better at the place-stand-and-hammer routine, but figured out a layout that resulted in almost no waste, and even had one uncut board leftover! Ha! We're good!It looks great and feels good underfoot! The next step is to put baseboard and door trim in. Then, everything, including the floor, has to be varnished. The sink needs to be hooked up. The furniture moved in. I will offer no guesses as to when that will all be finished. But, I can almost feel the pens back in my hand...
