Exhausted.
Mar 12th, 2006 by Jason
A few hours of work by Scott and Jason2 on Friday, 13 hours of work by all three of us yesterday (until 1:30AM last night — why the neighbors didn’t knock on our door for us circular sawing that late is beyond me), and 6 hours of a feeble attempt at work today = a freshly painting dining room, 300 sqft of new laminate flooring (that now covers the kitchen), and some rocking new electrical outlets/covers.
The only major problem is that the fridge sits higher on the new flooring and won’t roll back underneath the cabinets. When we had the drywall done, the guy built a “box” that filled in the space between the tops of the cabinets and the ceiling. I guess we had the cabinets a little crooked, so he built his box a little crooked, and now, well .. I’m not sure what we’ll end up doing. The fridge is as low as it can go. Maybe someone can shave 1/4 inch off the bottom of the cabinet for us? It’s pressboard, so I’m not sure if it can handle that without spintering into a zillion pieces.Oh, and Toby’s sick. He’s outside eating grass faster than I could mow it. 
Pictures of the blood, sweat and tears are here.
Hey! That looks great! Good stuff guys! Now we can play fusball again! That is when I can finally get ahold of you guys! Sheesh!!!
Yo-
Did you go with the laminate flooring from Sam’s or CostCo?
I think we got ours from CostCo (your boxes look the same…) but I cannot remember..may have been Sam’s…
Anyway.. careful with “water”… if it gets between the boards… you will see the edges of the boards swell a little… Lori overwatered a plant and some water was left “standing” on the kitchen floor… I now see the edges of the boards must have sucked up some water and swelled.
Also, Lori seemed to use a little too much liquid when cleaning the floors (HomeDepot sells a cleaner for laminate floors…) and you will see the same issues at the edges…
Just FYI
We went with the Uniboard Lock ‘n Seal stuff from Sam’s.
Thanks for the heads up about the water. We figured the planks near the fridge and sink would get wet the most, so we put some glue on the joints in those areas. I’ll make sure we don’t put any potted plants back there.
We should be out of this house in 2-3 months. Heaven help anyone who messes up the floor before then.
Exhausted doesnt even begin to cover it. Christ 330 rolled around this morning faster then ever.
Heaven help anyone that messes up the floor?? does that include the animals??? and the gremlins??
I had to do the same thing to my cabinet when I put a tile floor in the kitchen. I used a two step process, trim most of the material with a circular saw with a finish blade (40 tooth or more) and then fine tune it with a belt sander and 100 grit. Do you have a close up photo of the cabinet?
When you see the flooring swelling put a dehumidifer near it as soon as possible, this will remove the water and hopeful save any damage that may occur. This is what we use to do when we ewent in and cleaned up after a fire and there was water damage from it being put out. At lot of times we were able to save the hard wood floors.
I wonder if we took a belt sander to th bottom of the cabinet above the fridge if that would work to shave it down enough…
Wow.
John just swung by my desk at work and suggested that instead of shaving 1/4 of an inch off of the 15×30 inch bottom of the cabinet (a huge task for the tools that we have), we could shorten the two sides of the cabinets by 1/4 of an inch, in effect raising the bottom by that much.
I’ll try that tonight and see how it goes.
Belt sander might work too. It’s only like an eigth of an inch that needs to come off.
I just don’t know how hard it’d be to belt sand somewhat evenly, or if that even matters.
Hmmm I know vicki has that electric sander thingy if that helps at all. Oh and duh, seems so much easier to just trim th two sides instead of the whole thing. Duh.
The problem is can you get the bottom out/off and put it back without destroying everything? And if you do, you would probably have to move the screws/support point since moving it only 1/4″ would likely make it too weak. (If someone put something heavy in it.) Of course it would just drop 1/8″ onto the top of the fridge… (I have seen at least on kitchen where the cabinet over the fridge didn’t have a bottom.)