Working on walls

Now that I am done with the floor, I just added drywalls to the bottom half of the left and right walls.
Now this room actually look more like room.

This is before:



after Dry walls are attached,

I will now build partition walls.

Maru, Extremely cute cat

I normally go for dogs but this cat is way too cute. Never seen anything like it!

Now that the floor is pretty much level, I am ready to install plywood to create rough floor surface here.

The first thing I did was to place this cement board called "Wonder Board". There is nothing wonderful about this "Wonder Board". It is heavy, stinky, and cracks easily. I wish if I didn't use this product, I should have put another coat of self-leveling compound.

This is what its look like↓


The I placed very think plywood on the top of it.




The next thing I did is to anchor the plywood down to the concrete floor. What you need here is an impact driver to drill holes to the concrete floor.

It was reeeeeally hard and reeeeealy laud.

My ears were ringing for a long while after I did this.

Not only that but my dog freaked out and kept barking the whole time.

Here is the impact driver.



Here are the anchor bolts。



By the time I finished all the work, it was well after 8:00pm.




I played quite a bit with Koko on the new floor.




I made a huge progress today.

Good day, I must say.

Leveling the floor

Now that the floor is removed, I worked on building a new floor on the concrete surface. The first thing I did is to remove the anchors that were left on the concrete. I was able to remove all of them with crowbar after some work, except one.



I worked on it with my crowbar for good 15 minutes, It wiggles but just does not come off!

This is me slamming on the crowbar with a hummer, hoping that this would get the anchor out.



Eventually, I just gave up and glided off the anchor. I should have done that in the first place.

Then removed the drywalls that were blow where the floor level used to be. These walls are load bearing walls, so there should be thick plywood instead of drywall. What up with this? So I cut out plywood to the appropriate size and nails them there.

Here is what the wall looked like with the unnecessary drywall.



Also moved the location of the power outlets along the way.



This is how it looks like with the plywood in place.



By now, I was so beat, so I stopped working on this for the day.

---------------------------------------------
On the following day, I leveled the concrete floor.

Can you tell that this is not level from this picture?



So I used "self leveling compound" to level this.



This is it. This bag weighs something like 50 pounds. I also preped things like bucket, brush, and so on.

Do you see the power drill with mix hook attached? This equipment is REQUIRED, if you are to do the same thing. (yes, it is blocked by the bucket. bad picture... wasn't really thinking when taking the picture)



what you need to do is to put the compound and 1.5 gallon of water into the bucket and mix them thoroughly. But you got do mix this in less than 2 minutes. This is where you use the power drill.







After 2 minutes, this compound will start getting hardened. So you need to pour and spread this on the floor. Then even this out with your deck brush. This is what it should look like.



In 10 minutes it hardened like hard lubber. by 60 minutes, it turned white and it was as hard as concrete,



Now that the base is level, I will put plywood floor the next.

Playing with water

I took my family to a lake today.

We went to "San Luis Reservoir State Recreation Area", which is roughly 90 minutes away from where I live.

Here:


View Larger Map

Even though we are in the middle of summer, it was empty. Well, it was a week day after all. So what do you expect, I guess.

We took our dog along and we had a blast!

Koko swimming for the first time in his life.




We took a small recreational boat called "WalkerBay". You can either row or sail this boat.



My boys were rowing this boat, but it was pretty windy out there and they got pushed away very very far in very little time.

See the small boat in the back of the dog?



The boat became as small as

peanuts

in no time.

I was like "oh crap" and went to rescue the boys.

I am so glad I swam competitively for years when I was younger.

I got to the boat in a while, got on it and row it back to the shore. But wind was strong and was against us. It took us good half an hour to get back.

Then we played with the dog, played ukulele, had some snacks, swam some more, so on and so forth, but now I wanted to sail. So I rigged up Walkerbay.



Then I sailed out to the water but the wind was even harder than when I rescued my boat.



I haven't sailed for 2 years or so, so I ended up sailing left and right like Dr. Seuss

and eventually

capsized the boat.

Furthermore, I got so much water in the boat that I was not able to sail back to the shore, and ended up being rescued by nearby jet skier.

Well, so much for the fatherly authoritarian figure.

All in all, we had a blast!! It was probably the best day in 2009!

Removing floor

Since no dead bodies were discovered from underneath the floor, I took out rest of the floor board, and the structure underneath it. They were not just screwed on but also glued together, and were extremely difficult to take them apart.




Once I got the plywood off, I cut all the studs with chain saw and threw them out of Window.




I am like 80% done here.



The pieced on left and right sides were connected into the walls... so I just removed them with force.

Me creaming "Hahaha" with Joy!

Now I need to decide what the hell I am going to do with all the junk I just produced.

From Japanese room to western room

We have a very strange Japanese room in our house. The previous owner of our house has built it himself.



This Japanese room is on a raised floor and we just never really use it. The ceiling is too low because of the raised floor. The sliding doors are not really Japanese in any way you look at it. It just look very... FAKE.

So I decided to convert this room to be a normal living room with very large holdable door in between.

The first thing first. Cleaning up.



Then removed the sliding doors. This already gave us the sense of openness. I like it!




Removing molding with crowbar.






Then remove the rails of the sliding doors.

This was a lot of work, at this was screwed in with so many screws. All of them were buried with wood dowel. So i dug them out with chisel. It was quite a hassle to get them out.







But the real hard work was was above your head.





When the rails are removed, the room looks a LOT bigger.




Then I started to remove the floor with crowbar also.



About half way there,




I managed to get them all off, so I meant to call it done for the day...

But my wife goes:

妻が、

"What if there is a dead body hidden under neath??"」

She is all worked up and worried about it. So I decided cut out some holes and look below the floor.




Well, there was NO DEAD BODY.

But I guess she can now sleep well knowing that there is no dead body below the floor.

I am really beat, so would sleep really well also.