Just an update

We have been in the new house for about three weeks now and the schedule has been quite tight. The first week was just me in the house on a blowup matress, concrete floor and no heater (better than camping). The second week we got the carpets put down and then moved our proper bedding in from the old house. Before the carpet was down, the entire family spend the nights in the dining room on blowup mattresses, but I seemed to end up on the concrete floor each night.

Over the last two weekends, we have laid the entire timber floor (about 110sqm) and moved 90% of our belongings out from the old house. This weekend the task is to complete the move and put the beading in over the expansion gaps around the floating floor.

If you are thinking of laying a floor yourself I would recommend it if you consider yourself reasonably handy. The tools used, dropsaw, jigsaw, rubber mallet, sawbench for ripping lengthways (not totally necessary but easier if you have one), hammer, chisel set, profile guage, sliding bevel, square, goggles and a really good dust mask. A simple square room can be laid easily in one hour. The job slows down when you have to undercut at doorways and have angles to work to. For example, the lounge room of about 4 * 4 metres took one hour. The hallway of about 6 * 1.2 metres took 5 hours as this had five doorways to undercut, a linen press and angles to work to.

One day was pretty much spent on just checking all the levels of the concrete slab and putting down some self-leveling compound over the low spots. There was one high spot that technically should have been ground back. I looked at this for a while and thought about the huge mess it would make and then realised it would be directly under a table. So I thought bugger it and just left it. When the flooring went over this you actually couldn't tell.

The driveway is in the process of being concreted and we have changed our mind to just coloured concrete rather than exposed aggregate.

The pics below show the muddy driveway and the makeshift path I constructed from some discarded builders foil. The other photo's show the carpet going down and some of the flooring.

Again, I don't have lots of photo's as they are on someone else's camera, I will get these and some updates on soon.

We have been working quite a lot on the move and I have a deadline of this Sunday, even though the old house doesn't settle for another two weeks. I am going off to hospital next week and won't be doing anything physical for a couple of months afterwards. So the focus has been on getting the flooring done and the move - way too busy to even stop and take some decent photo's.

I will do my best to get some photos up by the end of this weekend....