One thing we had decided that we definitely wanted to do back before we put in an offer on the place was to open up the tiny doorway between the kitchen and living room. The kitchen felt really closed in, and the living room had this long interior wall. By opening up the doorway, we’d get more light through the entire floor and the kitchen wouldn’t feel so claustrophobic.

The doorway between the living room and the kitchen was this tiny door that made the kitchen feel very closed in. It had to go. The beam across the top is to hold the top of the wall rigid when we cut away the bottom.

We started this project in parallel with the floor sanding, since we needed to get rid of the wall before sanding those rooms. The house is made with “single wall” construction, so this wall was just made up of a single layer of tongue-and-groove planking, with a waist on one side, not very sturdy at all. The planks are just put on top of the floor and nailed down, and the same against the ceiling. This makes it easy to just remove it. There are no issues with it being load-bearing either.

Bengt has started cutting the top of the wall. Note that he can easily bend it apart at the cut with his hand.

After nailing two sturdy beams across the top to hold the remaining wall while we cut the bottom out, we pulled out the saw and started cutting. In no-time, the wall was loose.

Now the kitchen is open to the living room. A much more airy feel.

We had to be a bit careful getting the planks loose from the floor to minimize damage to the floor where they were nailed. After careful leveraging, they came out OK. However, there were clear traces of termites that had bored down through the inside of the wall and down into the floor boards. We had to do quite a bit of filling, so it’s not exactly hard to tell where the wall used to be.

The wall planks were to the floor with nails from both sides. Obligatory termite traces also visible.

Once the wall was gone, we went down to HPM to look for appropriately sized wood for making the frame. This was a bit tricky, because the old frame was made by cutting out a slot for the wall planks with a table saw. We didn’t have a table saw, and in any case we couldn’t find anything of the correct thickness. Finally we realized that we could manage by gluing several pieces together.

After removing the wall, we added framing. Finding pieces of the right size proved to be a bit tricky.

The frame was then glued together around the wall and nailed. It’s pretty sturdy.

The completed doorway. We really like the result.

The frame is still unpainted, but since we’re going to repaint the walls anyway, that’ll have to wait until we get to that point.

Finally, we’re getting to the end of the floor story. With the floors sanded, it was time to apply finish.

We (or really, I) spent many hours trying to figure out what kind of finish to use. There are many choices, oil-based or water-based, cheap or expensive, etc. Given the amount of work we had put in to getting the floors in shape, I was firmly determined to get the most durable finish possible, regardless of cost. Instead of getting stuff at Home Depot, I looked at what professionals use for commercial applications.

One type I looked at was the Eurolux Varnish from Fine Paints of Europe. But then I read about this product called “Bona”. Funny, I thought, because “bona” is a Swedish verb for finishing floors. It turns out that the word must come from the Swedish company with the same name, which has been making floor finishing products for a long time. They are apparently popular in commercial applications and make a whole line of water- and oil-based floor finishes. Supporting Swedish quality certainly sounded like a good idea!

The problem, as always, was how to get a hold of it. While some of their products are listed at Home Depot’s website, they are not the commercial-quality ones and in any case the Hilo store doesn’t carry them. Since shipping large amounts of finish to Hawaii usually is really expensive, it took some searching to find an online store that carried them and that also would ship to Hawaii for a not completely unreasonable cost.

So in the end we got two gallons of Bonaseal, which is a sealer/primer, and then six gallons of Bona Traffic HD, their most durable two-component polyurethane. This stuff isn’t cheap, the total cost was more or less a grand, but if it’ll keep the floors looking pristine for a decade or two, we figured it was well worth it.

Here’s the office after the coat of BonaSeal. The wood assumed a decidedly reddish hue when wet.

The office with freshly applied Bonaseal.

Applying the stuff was a bit unnerving, given how much work we’d put into it. It took a few tries to get the technique down. The finish spreads like water, and is supposed to go on in quite a thick layer. Getting an even layer was quite tricky, especially near the walls where you have to cut in with a roller. We left the large living room and kitchen area to the end, reasoning that any problems would be more visible there.

Here I’m applying the Bonaseal in the living room. You pour a long puddle out on the floor and then spread it out with the applicator.

Between the coats, we’d run the buffer with a 220 grit metal screen and then go over and hand sand any spots that poked up (usually where lint had fallen). The result was pretty good, though when you’ve done it yourself you of course see all the imperfections. Here’s the finished office:

This is the office with the cured, finished Bona Traffic.

Then it was time for the living room. We had a freak out the day before when we realized that we were using more than the recommended amount of Bonaseal, and it did not seem like we would have enough. (I found several people on the internet who had the same experience, the wood often absorbs it and you don’t get as much coverage as you expect. We overnighted another gallon of Bonaseal for a substantial cost, and we did indeed need to use about 1/3 of a gallon of it. Kind of annoying, but not much to do in that situation.

Here’s the living room with the wet Bonaseal on it:

Here’s a shot (through the lanai window) of the living room and kitchen after the application of Bonaseal.

This is the final coat of Bona Traffic going on the living room floor. The finish goes on very thick, you don’t paint it as much as spread it over the floor and let it self level.

Though you can walk on the floor after 24 hours, it’s not fully cured for a week and they don’t want you to replace furniture until after 3 days. Because Bengt was heading back to Sweden, we pushed the schedule a bit to get the fridge, which had been sitting outside (under shelter) still wrapped in paper from the move, back in. That thing is heavy, so we wanted three people to do it.

There were a few things left to do, the doorsteps had not been finished and we needed to add a cover over the “seam” in the floor where the old house meets the later addition. But now we could at least move in, which was good since I was already overdue setting up my remote office and getting back to work.

There’s been a while since the last episode of the whirlwind month of work after we moved in. That’s because, can you imagine, the work has just continued…

Anyway, when we ended, we were just about to go pick up my Dad at the airport and start sanding the floors. We were going to rent a floor sander from Home Depot, and the guy convinced us to not rent the “drum sander” but instead go with the oscillatory “buffer”, because it was less aggressive so that if you made a mistake, you wouldn’t gouge a big hole in the floors. Sounded good, so we took it home and chief machinist Bengt had at it.

Bengt does the first passes in the office with the “buffer”.

You may notice that it doesn’t exactly cut aggressively in the picture above. In fact, it barely scratched the surface of the old, dark, varnish. We went up to the coarsest paper available, 20-grit, and even then it didn’t exactly work quickly. It didn’t help that the old varnish gummed up the paper so that after only a few minutes, the paper was essentially floating on a bunch of “blobs” of varnish stuck in the paper. Then we had to switch to a new paper, while one of the non-operating workers cleaned the paper by prying the varnish blobs off with a knife. After going over the room for an entire morning, it looked like this:

This is after a few passes with the buffer. Notice that there’s still a lot of the dark varnish left, especially on the planks that are a bit lower.

Clearly this was not going to be a quick process. At the end of the day, we finally had something that looked reasonably free of varnish.

After going for an entire day with 20-grit in the office, we were down to something that looked reasonably fresh. There are still low spots, though.

Since we had spent an entire day on one small room, this wasn’t going to cut it. While Bengt continued with the buffer in the other small room, we decided that I would go back to HD and get the drum sander and attack the living room / kitchen. It would take forever with the buffer.

The drum sander was a totally different beast. With a large cylindrical drum with sand paper on, it bit into the wood like nobody’s business. It still gummed up with varnish, too, but much less. The trick was to move fast to not let the floor heat up, and to stop after every pass and flick off the few large blobs that would accumulate. (If you didn’t clean it in time, you’d end up with a streak of molten varnish going the entire circumference of the drum, and those were not easy to get off.)

This is the first pass with the drum sander. After 10 minutes it’s already done about as much as an entire morning with the buffer.

After two passes along the grain in opposite directions, it looked pretty good, but there was clearly much dark wood left. But at this point the drum didn’t gum up any more, so it was even faster to go.

This is after a second pass in the opposite direction from the first.

After reading about sanding online, people said that going diagonally was the fastest way to even out the surface and get the fastest cut, so we decided to give that a try. Boy, did it work!

Here I’m half-way through the first diagonal cut. Look at that color difference, finally we’re pretty much down to fresh wood.

After another pass on the opposite diagonal, the floor looked even. However, you can still see the darker areas around the perimeter of the floor. Those were very persistent.

After the opposite diagonal pass, the floor looks pretty much even.

Finally, after going up to 36-grit and doing another pass along the grain to get rid of the diagonal pattern, it looked way better than the office did after after going a whole day with the buffer. This had taken less than half the time in a room with about three times the area!

After a 36-grit pass along the grain, it looks pretty good.

We should have gotten the drum sander to begin with…

With the hard work done by the drum sander, we returned it to HD and Bengt continued doing the finer grits with the buffer. Going all the way up to 80 (or was it 100) grit took a few days, but the result looked nice.

This is the office floor after going all the way up to 80 or 100 grit. Time to apply finish.

Now it was time to meticulously clean up the large amounts of dust that was covering everything in the house and proceed to applying the finish. That’s for next post.

While all traces of the carpet in the other rooms got ripped out in less than two days, it took about a week to get it all out from the kitchen. This had to be done in stages. First, the carpet was ripped up. However, since the carpet was glued to the floor (as seen in the last picture in the previous post) this left part of the backing foam. To soften the glue so the foam could be scraped up, I used a carpet glue stripper whose active ingredient is methylene chloride, an incredibly nasty chemical. Getting it on your skin results in immediate chemical burns, and even the vapors give a burning sensation. It also has a tendency to penetrate most rubber gloves, even the pretty thick nitrile ones I used. Last but not least, it’s also a severe inhalation hazard. Its high vapor pressure means that it quickly evaporates and in areas with poor circulation the concentration can reach lethal levels! Moreover, organic respirator cartridges offer only temporary protection, so for sustained work a full-face, supplied-air respirator is necessary. If you imagine that a chemical like this would be regulated, you are mistaken. Go to the nearest hardware store and check, you’ll find that most paint strippers are methylene chloride based. If you are interested in more information about this nice household chemical, try following some of the links from that Wikipedia page. Suffice to say, I was less than pleased about having to work with it. The work became even less pleasant because it required me to squat for many hours wearing long pants, long sleeved shirt, goggles, and respirator. Now, we have good airflow through the house, but it still means it’s +25C inside on a nice day…

The foam had to removed by softering the glue with adhesive stripper, an incredibly nasty chemical. (Apparently there have been 13 fatalities due to this chemical, methylene chloride, since 2010….) And it had to be done in small sections, which made it very slow.

The work had to progress in stages. Stripper was glopped out on the foam, covering about a square meter, and covered with plastic sheeting (to prevent the stripper from evaporating before it has time to do its job). Because the foam is thick and sucks up the stripper, an absurd amount had to be used. In total, I went through about 3.5 gallons of it before the kitchen was done. The stripper was distributed by squeegeeing on top of the plastic in a procedure very similar to spreading epoxy on fiberglass. After 10 minutes, it’s time to remove the plastic sheet. If you were lucky and you got stripper everywhere, the foam comes off the floor in large sheets. If you’re unlucky, it doesn’t and it was necessary to either scrape hard or try to find unused stripper to move over to the dry part. Because the stripper evaporates so quickly, if you lift a piece of foam up and then drop it back down on the surface after 10 seconds or so, enough stripper has evaporated that it re-adheres and you’ll have a very difficult time getting it off without starting over again. When all the foam in the square meter you worked on is gone, you proceed to the next square meter and do the same thing. Am I making clear how much I was not a fan of doing this?

After the foam had been removed, a sticky layer of glue remained. This also had to be stripped, but we could at least use a more environmentally friendly stripper.

Once the foam was gone, there was still enough glue stuck to the wood that it would glue your shoes in place if you stood in one place for too long. I figured this would completely gum up any attempt at sanding the floor, so the glue had to come off. Luckily we could now use a more environmentally friendly chemical to do the job. SmartStrip proved very effective at dissolving the glue (and the old floor finish, too) and unlike the other stuff, the personal protection here pretty much extended to “don’t get it in your eyes”. (I tried to see if it worked on the foam, too, but it didn’t. Unlike the methylene chloride, it didn’t penetrate the foam to get down to the glue, even overnight. Too bad.) It still took a long time, though.

We slowly worked our way across the kitchen, first stripping the foam and then the glue. Overall, it took a week.

In the last picture above, you can see the original carpet to the right, then foam where the carpet has been ripped up, then the bare wood, shiny from the glue layer on it, and, finally, on the left the bare wood with glue and most of the floor finish stripped. Overall it took about a week to get the kitchen done, not so much in effective work time but rather because of waits and because there are only so many hours a day you can hunch over while sweating like a pig. It quite reminded me of “gummimarschen”, an exercise we did during my military service (which, in case you didn’t know, was as a chemical and nuclear weapons defense specialist. We spent a lot of time running around in gas masks and complete rubber suits…) The sensation of raising your arms above your shoulders and feeling the sweat that has pooled in your gloves run down your arms is quite characteristic…

Just for kicks, I dug out an archival picture from 1991. It’s not me, but it illustrates what I’m talking about:

An old picture from my military service, showing the chemical protection suits and gas masks we used. “Provkammare” means “testing chamber”, where tear gas is used to make sure there are no leaks in the equipment.

Anyway, we got it done just in time for the reinforcements to arrive. Bengt was on the way!

We moved in at the end of October, and the absolutely imperative task #1 to accomplish was to rip out the atrocious carpets that covered the hardwood floors. We had already scoped out the floors when we first looked at the place because, honestly, if it hadn’t had those wood floors underneath we would have passed on it completely. We wanted to get this done before the container with all our stuff arrived and the house was empty. Luckily, one room was a late addition and has a carpet that was at least passable, so we put our sleeping bags and suitcases in that room and went to work.

The rest of the house was about 1000 ft^2 of carpet, consisting two bedrooms, the living room, and the kitchen. (Yes, apparently some people think carpet in the kitchen is a good idea…) While Kathy logged on remotely to serve on a proposal review panel, I started ripping up carpet.

Starting to tear up the nasty, old, used-to-be-orange carpet.

The carpet is gone. Most of the rooms then had a layer of foam under it.

And here is the uncovered hardwood floor underneath. Looks in pretty good shape.

Getting these carpets up was pretty easy, as they were just stuck with tack strips (boards with short nails in them pointing up) around the edges. Of course, once you start ripping it up, all the nasty stuff that’s stuck in it starts to come out, so you don’t really want to think about what’s in it. With one room done, I continued with the rest.

The next room had the same color carpet, but since there had been a dresser of some sort on one side, you could appreciate the original color of the carpet

In this room, too, the floor underneath appeared to be in good shape.

The hallway, uncovered. All floors had this very dark finish.

The living room with the carpet removed. Unfortunately I don’t have a pre-shot of the color if this carpet, but a sample is visible on the little strip in the lower left.

So far I had not seen any evidence of termite damage, which is the big fear in Hawaii. Termites can literally eat up houses until they fall down unless protective measures are taken. These days, most wood is treated but that was not the case in 1950 when this house was built. (Depending on how it was treated, the treatment also loses effectiveness over time.) The house was tented this summer, before it went on the market, so there shouldn’t be any live termites, but there should be existing damage. The house inspector called the termite damage “moderate given the age of the house” when he walked through the attic. In the living room, I started seeing evidence of termites.

In the living room, the first termite damage was becoming visible. The dark powder is termite poop, and the tack strip by the wall is totally demolished.

The floor boards themselves appeared to only have slight termite damage. Here’s one example.

The living room had the same dark finish, except that it was much darker around the edges. Presumably the result of some very large rug.

The floor under the carpet in the addition to the living room was unfinished.

The house was expanded in the 90s, when the lanai and the extra bedroom was added and the living room got some extra space to accommodate a door to the lanai. The living room addition floors were unfinished and much lighter in color. First, I thought it was a different type of wood, but in the seam between ald and new you could see the unfinished ends of the old floor boards, too, and they were the same light color.

This is a closeup of the floor boards in the living room (bottom) and the addition (top). The ends of the living room boards are also unfinished, so you can see that it’s actually the same kind of wood.

We were told that this is “clear vertical grain douglas fir” and very nice wood. The boards are almost completely free of knots (we’ve found only two and those are in the late addition, apparently standards declined with time) and have the grain standing up parallel to the board so you get this stripy appearance.

So far things were progressing at a good clip. The first problem popped up when we entered the kitchen, where we discovered that the carpet had been glued. We’d spend a lot more time getting the kitchen floor down to bare wood than we did on all the other rooms together.

The carpet in the kitchen was, unlike the others, glued down. Getting it up would not be as easy. Here a section has been ripped up, leaving the backing foam glued to the wood.

… and we are back online after the move to Hawaii! Expect many home improvement updates soon.

This may be a more pedestrian project, but it looks like I’m going to have to do some home improvement. Unless we hit some unforeseen snag, this will be our new home in Hawaii:

It needs a bit of work, so the next few projects will probably have to do with things like installing a gas line, ripping up old carpets and maybe taking down a wall. With a little freshening up, it’ll be a nice place. The view from the lanai is nice, too, certainly way better than most houses we looked at.

The view from the lanai, with Hilo bay off in the distance.