Cabin Renovations - Road Trip Photos May 2016

Along with the upgrades to the cabin I decided to post a few more of my road trip pictures.  These photos were all taken on this trip. We take a victory photo when we finish a large area of the project.  My photo is on another camera, so I don't have that one readily available.  Probably just as well.  I am sure I looked a sight after crawling all over the floor.

Last post I showed some of the beautiful scenery taken on the drive up to the cabin.  I never tire of the natural beauty.  Today I just wanted to show a few photos of the latest cabin upgrades.  We were working on the bedroom.  It is only 10x10 so we managed to get that more or less completed this trip.  We were up for a week.  It took pretty much the whole week to get things done.

Our first project was to put the color coat of paint on the cinder block walls.  Last trip we had painted on the primer coat so we were able to start painting right away.  The room looks so much brighter with the light color.  After the walls, we put on the first coat of light green paint on the window trim.  That was pretty much the first day. 

The next day we put up the wood slat ceiling.  The furring strips had been put up on the previous trip, but we had to go back over that and add a few more shims here and there to get the ceiling as level as possible.  We also had to put some drywall tape and mud on areas of the ceiling where we had to make some repairs and put up some new drywall.  Then we started to put up the ceiling.  I guess our experience of putting up the wood slat ceiling in the kitchen, dining room area, and living room have paid off.  We were much more efficient in getting this ceiling up.  The area of the room was small, so it was something of a challenge to keep the joints from the slats from lining up in a noticeable way.  The slats had been painted with a matte polyurethane while we were home, so they were ready to go when we got up there.  After the ceiling went up we painted the second coat on the windows.  That was pretty much a full day.

After the walls, windows, and ceiling were done we tackled putting in the laminate flooring.  Before the flooring could go down, the floor had to be leveled.  The old planks were quite warped.   Laminate can crack if there is a variation of more than an eighth of an inch in the level of the floor.  One method would be to use skimcoat, but the floor was a bit too warped for that.  The depth of the change in the floor would have meant a very long drying time.  The floor was built up to level by stapling down layers of tar paper.  This is an old cabin.  Sometimes you have to be creative in these fixes.  That was another days work. 

It was a little difficult to lay the flooring in such a small space.  We would put down a row of the vapor barrier, bring in a box of boards and lay a few rows.  The boxes were quite heavy.  They were heavier than a normal box of laminate flooring.  This flooring was laminate flooring that we had salvaged after a plumbing problem wrecked half our basement last year.  Because that flooring ran through two bedrooms, the den and a hallway, we salvaged enough to lay the flooring at the cabin.  Anyway, the new flooring for our home was sized differently than the old flooring and we used the boxes from the new flooring to pack up the old flooring for transport to the cabin. We could pack up more of the old flooring into each box.  They were so heavy that it took two of us to move them.  A normal box of flooring can generally be moved by one person.

If we had not had that flooring, we would have purchased laminate flooring that looked a little different, perhaps more rustic.  But, we had this, and free is good when you are doing renovations.  Our laminate from the basement was made for below grade applications, so I expect it will do well in the cabin, even though it is not a continuously conditioned space.  If not, sooner or later we will be adding new flooring.

I thought I would throw in a little interesting factoid I learned about laminate flooring.  In the U.S., when someone lays a floor, it is pretty much considered a done deal:  down for the duration.  Most of the newer laminate flooring is manufactured to be taken apart and moved up to three times.  In Europe, apartment size has been standardized for some time.  When people move from one place to another they pack up their laminate floor and take it with them.  It is this feature of the flooring that allowed us to take it up in one place and lay it in another.

After all that work, we needed a day of rest.  We down the mountain, visited my mother, and hit the grocery store and hardware store.  While at the home store we purchased four hundred and fifty pounds of rock that I layed on the road later in the week.  I also brought up another hundred pounds of gravel from the stream.  The weather has been so rainy that the road was developing some deep ruts.

The cabin is really starting to look beautiful.  The flooring sweeps through the kitchen, dining area, living room, and bedroom.   The wood slat ceiling looks the same.  The long run of the floor and ceiling through the dining area and living room gives the room the illusion of length.  I have heard that this is called the bowling alley effect.  In long narrow spaces it can work against design, but in this small cabin it definitely makes the place look larger.

With all the work we have done on the place, you would think it was almost finished.  Not yet.  There is still more work to be done.  More about that on our next trip to the cabin. 

Next blog post I will be back to blogging on the folk art lamb.  Check back on Thursday for a new post.