A Wood Floor for the Living Room

By the time we saw and bought our San Simeon house, the selling broker had neutralized it, covering up garish paint and mildewed grout.  The entire outside, previously red-brown, powder blue, with some canary yellow and olive green accents, was painted the same color, a sand brown. Everything inside that had paint on it was covered in the same color, a little lighter than the one outside. Living room, dining room, hallway and all bedrooms were freshly carpeted with cheap, abrasive, petroleum-based carpeting, also a light shade of sand brown, that wrinkled even in its youth. Lord knows what had been there before, but the new carpeting never fooled Jasmine. She could smell the previous owners' dogs throughout the house. We don't know who plastered over the zebra skin wallpaper in the guest bath, or what the wallpaper was in the master bath before it got plastered, but we are grateful for the plaster.

Listing photos from 2005 (left two), and 2006 after neutralization

The first three months in the house, kitchen was gutted and tiles replaced or laid in the dining room, family room and guest bath, which is another story. This story is about Shari's victory over the blue-grey tiled banco, painted cedar-slatted walls, and wrinkled acrylic carpet in the six-sided living room.

When the house was built in the 1980's, the living room had a cedar ceiling, the cedar planks continuing down the fireplace and picture window. Long before we saw it, the cedar got painted. Pity. Shari never liked the painted, stapled, wood slat effect on those two walls (who stares upwards?), and we were both disgusted with the blue-grey tiles. As is our modus operandi on most remodeling projects, Shari led the way.

First she painted the tiles with a dark brown oil paint. That eliminated the wretched blue-gray in an otherwise earth-toned house. That also inspired her with additional shades of browns on the walls. Soon she had talked me into the job I had been resisting: cutting and screwing wallboard over the two painted wood walls, and Shari plastered them. That was last year.

The carpet continued to sag and wrinkle. While not pronounced enough to trip a drunk in the dark, an obvious twenty foot ripple down the middle of the living room carpet is nothing to show off. Being a typical male in this regard -- particularly in this economy where we as a society abandon poor and middle class in order to make the wealthy even more obscenely rich -- I was happy to leave the carpet alone, muttering something about ten to fifteen dollars a square foot times a large area. Shari sold some Turkish carpets and kilims that had become surplus in our down-sizing to get here in Tucson, we got an income tax refund, and Shari found the wood floor that would make her happy.

I'd installed wood floor myself, but a lot of what I taught myself about remodeling in Puget Sound (wood construction) doesn't apply in Tucson (concrete slab). I had floated floor on Whidbey. Here they recommend gluing it to the slab. The living room is an irregular hexagon. That's a lot of odd angle cuts to be playing around with while the glue is hardening on floor, plank bottoms and inevitably tops, and my hands and everything they touch. We had the installation done, which was one of the smartest decisions I have made. Scheduled for a day, it took them two to finish.

We kept plenty of work for ourselves, so we weren't jealous. I added 2x4's to make the banco by the window deeper. Hardibacker was cut to fit, then the entire banco was slathered with two kinds of glue. The first kind I used was made to stick tile. Shucks. All those plastic gallon containers with fancy names and instructions printed in minute-sized, compressed fonts look alike when you are grabbing. Hardibacker glued and screwed over the tiles, then a layer of a special base cement, then slathered with a special plaster base cement, then plastered. Shari, whose plastering and texturing are some of the many skills in which she excels over me, said the final plaster coat was the hardest job she had ever done. Plaster dried and got two coast of dark brown.

Meanwhile, I pulled carpet and laid two inch pieces of tumbled travertine on the two sets of two concrete slab steps, each ten feet wide, leading into the living room. The humps and gaps of the little tiles, fast hardening to the concrete, proved that the slab wasn't level. Shari and I shared some differences of opinion on the significance of the geometrical oddities. To me, the imperfections were a part of the natural beauty. But Shari criticized my haste in setting the tile without measuring and leveling the surface. After the wood floor was laid, the huge, undulating gaps between floor and tiles that should almost have reached the floor (5/8" gap for the planks) could have made a sailor seasick. We covered them with quarter-round molding.

We love the results, complimented with a new leather sofa, our large Turkoman carpet, and our desert spoon agave spike collection nestled in a Mexican urn.

And Shari and I are still friends.