If the love of your life ever suggests you lay reclaimed parquet flooring, run a mile! If running is not your thing, read on.....
This job would have been slightly easier if I was not working around SWMBOs piano - having nowhere else to store it however, its a case of work round it but don't, whatever you do, use it to store paint on, cups of coffee, chisels or tiny screws you needed to put somewhere safe where nobody will move them.... inevitably somebody will - probably while swearing about the piano being used as a shelf for paint, cups of coffee and chisels
Once we had sorted that little issue it was time to lift the old carpet, and the hardboard that had mapped to the contours of the underlying floorboards and start again with something a bit more substantial - 12mm ply in this case.
Spent ages trying to decide on whether to leave expansion gaps for the subfloor and if so how large, went for a couple of mm in the end as ply should be fairly stable I hope
Careful notching round the door frames...
And done with the subfloor (note the painted skirting as well!)
Even managed to go under the piano!
So with the subfloor laid, time to get on with the parquet itself. An e-bay bargain, I bought this a year or so ago with a view to starting rather sooner than I actually managed to. It has therefore been sitting on the drive under a tarp for 12 months or so....
I bought 5 ton bags of this with the flooring just thrown in. I then stacked it neatly into 3 bags but my word is it messy. The bitumen on the back seems to get everywhere and it smells strongly as well. My stock with SWMBO is definitely at a low point by now. I looked like a coal miner just from moving the stuff around. Anyhow, time to deal with the bitumen. A bit of reading suggested that the best way was simply to scrape it so I set up a couple of battens to hold the blocks and got to it (ooh look - a use for a workmate!)
The battens gave me something to push against and had the added bonus of checking the size of each block. This was an unintended consequence, but it turns out about 1 in 20 are about 10mm shorter than the other 95%. Not quite sure why, possibly from an edge, but it did at least let me put these to one side rather than clean them up. I did 5 blocks at a time. Before....
After....
I reckon it takes about 7-8 minutes to sort out 5 blocks, scrape the sides (freehand, mostly grot that has fallen between blocks for years before they were lifted I suspect) then the bases. At that rate I am doing approx 40 an hour. Base comes up nice and flat but still leaves your fingers black and has an oily texture
Stacked in piles of 50 blocks inside to allow them to fully acclimatise
I am averaging 200 blocks in a day, and need 1200 approx for the dining room, so 3 weekends of full on bitumen scraping - nice. Done 900 so far and am beginning to regret this decision!
It turns out some of the blocks were particularly wet and I have had to put these to one side for a while. Many also have tape on the top surface, being lifted from a sports hall apparently. I have scraped the tape off the top of each block but the top surface is very dull and dirty. No mold or damage, just dirt, old varnish etc. I tried sanding a couple to get a feel for what they would come up like (and because SWMBO is decidedly not impressed by this point) but the sanding belt got clogged very quickly and I am worried that a floor sander is not going to cope very well either. In the end I took a few blocks and gave the top surface a skim through a thicknesser - just enough to remove the top surface...
Much better (but do I really want to skim 1200 blocks through a thicknesser.....) and now SWMBO is looking happier. The stain on a few of these is where I gave them a wipe with sealer as it was all I had to hand, just to see how the grain would come out. These blocks were sold as teak but I am 99.9% sure they are iroko.
So there we are, 300 odd blocks still to go, but it looks as if it might not be a total disaster - fingers crossed!
Steve