2019-10-13

cimorene: Blue text reading "This Old House" over a photo of a small yellow house (knypplinge)
2019-10-13 06:41 pm
Entry tags:

Knypplinge: new floor installation edition (part 1)

We went up to our attic bedroom this morning and ripped up the old vinyl floor (I cut myself on a torn edge of it in the process and let's just say we have to hope really hard that none of it included asbestos!) and opened the first two packages of cork floor panels. They're lovely and how to click them together is essentially self-explanatory; however, we neglected to prepare by bringing a saw (yes, we obviously KNEW we had to cut some of the pieces, but we just... completely forgot), not to mention an angle iron, and also we forgot that we have to notch out the bottom of the doorframe. So.

There IS a circular saw at Ängisbacka (in spite of a conversation last week that ended in confusion on both sides: Wax didn't know what saw I was talking about, and I emerged convinced that the only electric saw on the premises was a chainsaw), and we could've just driven over there and back with it, or we could've wallpapered instead, but it's a bit cold and we don't really want to wallpaper right now and [personal profile] waxjism has been having - to resort to understatement - a tough couple of weeks. So instead we sat down with a liter of tea and ate an entire bag of cantuccini (the Italian almond cookies known as biscotti in North America, but 'biscotti' refers to all cookies in Italy, so with imported ones the only ones we get here it makes more sense to just use their term I suppose). (They were really good in spite of being store brand! And in the case of imported food, store brand usually means the chain buys them in bulk from the country of origin, so no surprise really. These ones had a hint of orange in with the almonds and vanilla.)

In the course of all this, Wax looked up the manufacturer's guide to floating floor installation, and the first thing it said was the Finnish equivalent of "WARNING: DO NOT EVER PUT YOUR KITCHEN CABINETS IN ON TOP OF A FLOATING FLOOR!!!" This was dismaying because that's what we were planning to do, although we haven't done it yet so there's no reason we couldn't do it the other way around I guess. Buuuuuuut... I mean, I guess it doesn't matter if there's subfloor underneath the cabinets, but what about all the cuts you'd have to make to make the tiles wrap around the cabinet shape?! That seems like a lot of cutting that I don't want to do.