DIY grout sealing

So with the weather forecast being pretty dire this weekend, I decided it was time to stop procrastinating and get the floating floor finished - only had to do a little finishing off in the study, kitchen and pantry, but the last fiddly bits took me forever to plan, measure, measure, cut, swear because it didn't fit, measure, cut again, and finally put it in properly. Anyway no photos because it's a mess and I can't be bothered cleaning up.

However, here's some photos we took earlier of sealing our tiles. Most people know the pain of scrubbing out mouldy areas of grout in showers, and while sealing the grout won't eliminate the problem, it should make it less of a problem.

The issue is that water penetrates grout, stagnates and forms the ideal breeding condition for mould. Sealing the grout essentially aims to provide a hydrophobic (water repelling) barrier, to prevent the water getting in.

So, this is what you need to get started: grout sealer (try your local hardware or tile store), some paper towels, fine brushes, a plastic tub, gloves and eye protection. Electric shaver is optional.


On the instructions for the grout sealer, our one said to spray it over the grout and use paper towels to mop up the excess. We thought a much more precise and efficient way to apply it would be to spray the sealer into the plastic tub, then paint it on using the brushes.

The paper towels are used in case any drips go onto the tiles. With doing walls, you can't use too much sealer as it'll drip.



However, doing floor grout you can put a lot more sealer on, as it'll pool in the grout line.

Also, if you've been using your shower, you should let it dry out for 48 hours before sealing it, and not use it for 24 hours after sealing it. We also did 2 coats in the shower to give the sealer as much coverage as possible.

This is a pretty simple DIY, 1/10 for difficulty. Just takes a bit of time and patience to do a neat job. You might need to redo it every 4-5 years or so depending on how you use your shower.

T&T

Kitchen: floating floor installation, and ADSL investigation

So after reporting to iinet on Friday night that my broadband wasn't working, I was called yesterday morning to schedule an appointment sometime today on my day off - the technician came around 10:30, tested the line and determined that there's a fault somewhere up the line. He called Telstra, and apparently it'll all be fixed up tomorrow! Kind of surprised to see how fast things are getting fixed - so far, big thumbs up to iinet for their customer support. Hoping to be on proper ADSL2+ by tomorrow night!


Spent the rest of the day preparing and laying the flooring in the kitchen. After removing all the plaster lumps and filling in holes in the slab, laid down the underlay/moisture barrier.


Few hours later, kitchen flooring is done. The only parts I'm leaving for later are the small gaps where I have to cut boards lengthways to slot them in, hoping to have them all fixed up this weekend.


Nice to finally have the concrete slab covered up, the amount of dust coming up all the time was driving us insane - couldn't keep anything clean!

T&T

Floating floors, day...?

Did a bit more flooring since the last post - finished off the study on Cup Day.


We salvaged the temporary front door (it was going to be thrown away anyway!) and stuck a couple of trestle legs underneath it to turn it into our new study table. Not sure if we'll paint it, vinyl wrap it or do something else, it's a bit rough at the moment but looks nice and is huge!

Nearly finished the entry and hallway, and there's a few fiddly bits left under the stairs and towards the powder room and laundry.


Will need to find my jigsaw for some complex cuts near doorways, and re-arrange my dropsaw to do lengthway cuts.

Also finally got my iinet ADSL2+ connection established - bought a brand new ADSL router, and... well, nothing works. Lodged a fault report with iinet who will then take it up with Telstra if it's a Telstra wiring error. However, if there's a fault in the wiring internally, then it's yet one more stuffup to fix up. Unfortunately I think we got the worst data cablers in the world to do our house, with the antenna not connected to starserve and the data plugs not correctly attached - they all "fall in" to the wall cavity when I try to plug in a data cable. Meh. Anyway, should it turn out to be a problem with the internal wiring, I'll get it fixed up and send the bill to Metricon, who can then get the idiot cablers who stuffed it up in the first place to reimburse my costs.

T&T

Floating floor installation Day 2, more pain and suffering but we're getting there.

Today I completed about 60% of the sitting room floor before lunch while Tina prepared the family room for installation; removing all plaster lumps, vacuuming and underlay. We then started on the family room after lunch.

Before: Family room cleared of all furniture (of course), slab as clean as possible. If you look closely out the window, you can just see the head of Mr Meyer, our lemon tree - despite our poor track record of keeping plants alive, Mr Meyer seems to be thriving even in the constant rain we've had the last few days.


Next picture, about halfway done with the family room. The complicated thing here is that we started the entry and hallway before the family room, and we want the boards to line up. This involved lots of measuring and calculating, and allow 15.9cm of space before laying the first full board in the family room. Once the boards here meet up with the hallway boards, I'll go back and trim a line of boards to fit against the wall.


Essential tools for floating floor installation: Hammer, pull bar, rubber mallet, tapping block, spacer blocks, pencil, ruler, measuring tape, a bigger hammer when you realise you should've spent more than $3.99 on the first hammer which weighs as much as a banana and is about as effective. Plus a few bandaids for those scraped knuckles, and lots of swearing when you accidently bang your rubber mallet against the wall and it leaves a big black scar that you'll have to come and patch/repaint later. Or just pay someone else to deal with the pain and suffering of installing a floor. But I figure we've come this far, we might as well push on until it's all done - it's like watching a bad movie, thinking you should walk out but there's only 20 more minutes to go.

Finally, the end result, family room pretty much all done, but where it extends into the hallway at the bottom of the picture not yet done.


Pretty happy with how things are going so far, but the complicated part really starts tomorrow where I have to make sure the family room floorboards are perfectly parallel with the hallway flooring. Plus doing the study with the double cavity doors - I think I'll have to put a 3mm expansion gap filled with cork, caulk or an expansion joint, depending on how closely we can cut and lay the flooring.

I've also discovered a little dip in the floor, right near the entrance door - d'oh! I think I'll put a potplant or something over it to stop visitors walking on it and noticing the defect. High tech solution, right?

T&T

Flooring update: Floating floor installation Day 1

Been a busy week, so not much time for blog posts. Tina's brother made a surprise visit from the UK, so spent most of the week eating out and stuffing our faces. Anyway, we made up for all that indulgence during the first couple of days of the Melbourne Cup long weekend, getting started on our floor installation!

The delivery of 130sqm of flooring and underlay was scheduled for Saturday, but ended up arriving Friday afternoon instead. We measured up the ground floor, and it came to 122.5sqm - but decided to order a bit more to allow for offcuts, excess etc - always a good idea!

Now, at this early stage of the post I figure it's a good idea to make this disclaimer: installing floating floors is difficult, time-consuming and back-breaking labour! Don't believe the salespeople when they say anyone can do it with a few simple tools in half an hour, it ain't true! While we have decided to install our own floating floor, I'm certainly not recommending everyone reading this blog to give it a shot unless you have the required tools, a lot of time, forgiving neighbours who don't mind 8 hours of power-tool usage, and a spare labourer or two, this is NOT a one-person job! On that note, Tina has done a superb job as my unpaid labourer, preparing floors, taping underlay and moving lots of floorboards around - gutsy!

Anyway, getting back to the story, Friday and Saturday was set aside for preparation. As one of my uni lecturers used to say - Proper Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance! Lots of lumps of plaster and other junk was left on our slab, so it took a few hours going around on hands & knees with a hammer & chisel, chipping off all the lumps. Our slab was pretty flat - ideally you don't want any more than 3mm variation from flat over a 2m run. We then swept and vacuumed the slab in preparation for the underlay.


The underlay is 3mm foam with attached plastic membrane - important if you're laying a floating floor on concrete, to prevent moisture building up and warping the boards. You can lay floating floors directly over old floorboards, vinyl tiles, tiles, concrete, providing the foundation is stable and not too uneven. We taped over all the joins with duct tape. The underlay runs at 90 degrees to the direction of the floorboards.


The first row we laid along the long side of the entrance. The little black blocks are spacer to maintain approx 10mm gap between the floorboards and the skirting to allow for expansion and contraction of the boards. We'll cover up the gaps later with some flat bead/quad. The brand we chose for floorboards was Tarkett, using their "clicky-locky" system, which is actually really painful to work with, if you follow their instructions! Their idea of an easy installation is to lay an entire line of boards, then lift & click it into the previous line of boards. Easy to do, if you have 2 boards - impossible if you have a long line of boards 4 or more! To solve this installation problem, I decided to grind off the end tongue of every second board, that way we could install 2 boards at a time and tap them together.



We then just kept adding rows - we staggered the start of each row by approx 1/3 or 1/2 of a board. With the random design of our floorboards, keeping the joins consistent isn't necessary - good for us! When it comes to placing the boards in the kitchen, we'll use wood-glue to seal up the joins during placement to minimise problems of water spillage.

Finally we decided to wrap things up around 8pm (local laws state no power-tool usage after 8pm, or before 9am) and I figured I'd annoyed the neighbours enough. Plus today was Halloween - saw lots of kids walking up & down the street, but probably scared off by the noise my drop-saw was making! Luckily for us too, our neighbours dropped in for a stickybeak this afternoon and loaned us a circular saw - thanks Anthony & Suzanne!



So, this is the end result for about 6 hours of floating floor installation by a couple of inexperience n00bs to DIY flooring. My parents dropped by and were impressed so far - certainly better than the dusty concrete slab we were putting up with before! Essentially we've got the entry done, and hoping to complete the sitting room and study tomorrow now that we're getting the hang of things!

Just to repeat - installing floating floors isn't easy or simple! We slept for 12 hours last night exhausted, and that was only after slab preparation and the first 2 rows of floorboards. Will probably get the same amount of sleep tonight as there's another big day ahead tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone who have ordered our soft-closing door dampers from tim-and-tina.com! We're about halfway through our initial order of door closers and hope everyone is having as good results as we have experienced!

T&T

Flooring - narrowing down colour choices

Did a bit of window shopping yesterday - headed back to Fowles in Clayton to check out their floor display. Plenty of laminates and timber floors to look at, but not so many in the greys that we're after. There was another flooring place nearby, and we picked up a couple of samples from there as they had two that are close to what we're wanting.


These samples are from Tarkett, a German brand. Also sold in Bunnings, but they only have a few samples from a different range. Both of these samples are commercial market laminates, and the one on the left has lots of variation. When you combine it with a few other boards, the visual board width varies, so some boards appear twice as wide as the other ones. There are also "imperfections" printed into the laminate (not in this sample board); so this board would look perfect in a funky clothing store, or maybe a laneway cafe. The board on the right has a lot more consistency and has a definite black/charcoal tone to it. Matches the charcoal stain on our door, but over a larger open area perhaps will be too dark.


Closer.... and you can see how the darker board shows up footprints - but then again, with our current slab exposed we're getting heaps and heaps of dusting. The lighter board shows up hardly any footprints at all. You can also see the click system they use, similar to all the laminates in the market where you can just "click" the boards and they lock into place. I think we're leaning towards the lighter one, as it suits our grey neutral colour scheme better, and shows dirt/dust less.

So, just like evaporative cooling vs refrigerated aircon described previously, all the various floor systems have their pros and cons - for us, the main thing is the colour and appearance of the floor, and we can't find the look that we want in a real wood or bamboo floor (plenty of reds and browns, no greys) - so far only laminate. Haven't looked much into vinyl planks, but I imagine they'd be able to produce a grey vinyl plank with no difficulty.

Anyway, not going to settle on a colour yet as there's plenty of other retailers to check out - though we're hoping to have picked one and have it delivered to our house before the Melbourne Cup weekend. Plus I need to get stuck into preparing the slab for the floor; which means many painful hours on hands & knees, using a hammer & chisel to knock off all the excess plaster and gunk that has built up on the slab.

Had a little dinner party with some old friends last night, and got a Lemon Meyer tree as a housewarming present - awesome! Always had plans to get one (to supply the necessary lemons for Coronas) so hopefully today we'll pick up a big pot and some advice to keep this thing from dying - we don't have a good track record with plants, but I think we'll put some effort into keeping this one alive!

T&T

Flooring decisions - what colour and what to put on the ground floor?

So we had our carpet installed last week, and loving it - deep charcoal colour and feels great underfoot. Our main problem is still what to use on the ground floor? It'll have to be a timber-style flooring, but to use real wood, laminates, vinyl planks, bamboo...?

Whatever the actual material, the look of it will have to suit our house - grey neutrals. This dark charcoal/black timber look in the next picture is a pretty good indication of where we're heading.

The issue then becomes - is it too dark? The dangers here are that the dark floor will show every bit of fluff/lint etc. Maybe a lighter grey floor would be the way to go? This next pic is of brown toned floor but with plenty of grey tones in it. Quite nice!


We've been through plenty of chain-store commercial carpet places, you know the ones I'm talking about. Big thumbs down to the d!ckhead working at the carpet place on whitehorse rd near Adriatic - what's the point of acting like a snob and talking down rudely to your customers - reckon being arrogant will get you a sale? Give up your day job mate!

Anyway, if anyone can recommend some good places to check out varieties and prices on timber/laminate flooring in Melbourne's east, please comment below! Needing about 130sqm of the stuff just for the ground floor - anyone got that amount leftover they want to donate to us?

T&T

Carpet delayed, Metricon house for sale in Balwyn North

Got a call from Fowles today, saying that our booked carpet installer had an injury on the job today, so we won't be having our carpets installed tomorrow. A minor setback for us, but having experience a work injury a few years back, I just hope the bloke involved recovers 100%. So maybe sometime next week or week after - they'll call me back to confirm a day.

And what did we do, the day after handover last week? Went to check out a home for sale (of course) in Balwyn North - a Liberty that was finished about 3 months ago.


Quite a nice facade. Uses our bricks in 50mm, timber windows all around, and a big light aggregate driveway that extends in front for extra parking space. Zero maintenance gargens all around are great too. Up and down lights on the ground floor plus eave downlights are really nice for external lighting. The only issue for me is that the ground floor is below street level, set down a metre or so - bad feng shui!


Nice big kitchen. Tower wall oven allows more pot drawers.


The bathrooms all have this colour scheme - it looks OK in this photo, but in real life is horribly dark and claustrophobic. Tiling goes all the way up to the cornice, which wasn't offered to us when doing our selections.

A steal at $2.25m or so - includes a pool out the back too! If you want more details on it, click here. Looks like it's a private sale, so no auction date to attend.

T&T

Stairs: Organising sanding & staining

So we upgraded our stairs to cantilevered hardwood stairs and stainless steel balusters; but they come in a raw finish. We want them stained charcoal to match our front and rear doors - in fact, we want things to look pretty much like this picture below;


...with nice dark wood floors through all of downstairs, and dark stained stairs & handrail. Got in touch with a guy recommended to us from our earlier SS, and hopefully he'll get back to us with a quote. Ideally we want the stairs sanded and stained pretty quickly after handover, and before the carpets go in. Hopefully won't take too long - stairs will need sanding first, then a few coats of stain with drying time in-between each coat. Maybe a day's work?

Also the picture above is from the Nolan on display in Point Cook, which apparently has just been sold. Don't know if it's still open as a display home; we only visited it once. Just looking at the picture above, it's got huge entry (external) doors placed to the sitting room on the right - expensive! The bulkhead in the entry hallway is about $1000 option.

T&T

Day 243: Carpet chosen and booked in

Went down to Fowles in Clayton to confirm the carpet we've chosen to upstairs and the home theatre room. It's a Godfrey Hirsch solution dyed nylon, colour is called Granite - a kind of mid-grey charcoal. It's been very difficult to choose a grey carpet, because so many of them look grey in the shop, but brown when samples are in our house!


Looks good, a modern neutral colour that (hopefully) won't date at all! After that, headed all the way down to Cranbourne to check out their Homemaker Centre, and then stopped by all the display homes in Lyndhurst to have a look at their interior decorations and landscaping ideas.

While there, having a look in one of the bathrooms, it reminded me that we have to check how the door that opens from Bed 4 into the bathroom will be "stopped". Most doors open against a wall, so a little rubber bumper is stuck on the wall to stop the door handle banging on the plaster. But from our Bed 4, the door opens against where the shower door is, kind of like in the photo below.


But if you look at the tiled floor, you can see a little half-mushroom doorstop; which will stop the door handle smashing the shower glass. However in our case it's slightly different, because the bed door opens towards the shower door, and the shower door opens out towards the bed door... confusing! Anyway we'll check for that later.

T&T

Day 241...

First of all, thanks for everyone who left comments on the last blog entry wishing us good luck for the inspection today! It was very touching to see how many people are following our build journey, and good luck to everyone who is building as well!

Now, as it turns out, we didn't have our "official" completion inspection today as our SS wanted some more time to get everything up to his standard, and the QA people hadn't been through yet.

Are we complaining - definitely not! We've said all along that quality takes priority over speed every time, and it's a good thing that our house isn't being rushed for no reason. So we'll have our official walkthrough in a few weeks once our SS believes our house is ready.

Anyway, we had our independent inspector Alex walk though the house today since we'd booked him in on Monday, and his opinion so far? A few little things to fix as expected, but overall, even in its current unfinished state, our house is of generally good quality, no major problems, and good brickwork! Alex also took the time too walk us around the outside of our house to explain the working of things like articulation joints, weep holes, and other construction items, which was very educational to know about. So if you feel like you want an inspector to check on your house build, or an established house, we'd recommend Alex at Urban Property Inspections - tell him we sent you!

And while we were there, a truck rolled up and packed up all the temporary fencing - our house looks incredible without all the wire fence (and portaloo!) removed! Front garage door is down, it's Surfmist to match the fascia, and cladding colour.


Got to find a way to hide the neighbour's exposed garage wall on the boundary. Also going to need some quotes on a double-width driveway, getting a wider crossover, and replacing some cracked footpath squares. And ideas for landscaping, a front fence... rear landscaping, deck... and getting my fencer to replace the fence alongside the garage! We'll also head to Fowles Clayton on Sunday to put a deposit on carpet for ASAP after handover, and also probably head down Cranbourne way to check out some places for timber, laminate, vinyl, bamboo floors - though we may have to wait on putting in floor coverings for the ground floor until the bank balance recovers!

Also got a call from Tru Energy to connect/transfer gas & electricity to our name; so things are moving along now!

So while we have an updated schedule for the final inspection and handover, I think we'll keep that a secret for the time being.. helps build up the suspense, doesn't it!

T&T

Day 210: Gearing up for the final stages!

Ran into our SS today - he was at our neighbour's site (which he also supervises), cleaning up all the loose rubbish on the block himself. Nice to see a SS who gets his hands dirty! Anyway, apparently we're still on track to get most of the internal fixing done by end of the month.

He did say we can get our carpets in before handover, which is brilliant news - now I'm wondering if we should get our stairs sanded & stained as well, before the carpets are installed. It's a matter of finding out whether a dark stain on the stairs (to match our front & rear doors) would be too dark - will check with Tina on that first. Be nice to have it done before carpets go in upstairs, for a neater finish.

Anyway, I grabbed a meat pie and sauce (the bakery around the corner does the best homemade beef & cheese pies with huge chunks!) and had lunch in the kitchen, daydreaming about how in the not-too-distant future we'd be in the kitchen cooking up a storm, watching TV, and just living the life in the house we've been dreaming and planning for the last 2-3 years!

No trades have been working the last few days, so I just wandered around, trying to see if there's any defects we need to keep an eye on for our final inspection. I don't think I'll bother our SS with anything I find at the moment, as there's still their own QA inspection and window service to be done, and there's still a lot of internal fitoffs to go. Anyway, here's a few minor things that will probably get fixed before our final inspection.

I've heard a lot about this window service thing, which is where all the windows get inspected and fixed before handover. A lot of our window frames were damaged externally during bricklaying with dents and scrapes, so they'll need to be fixed. Also, some windows are sticking or not straight. For example, this is the family room window: at the top there's a big gap, while at the bottom it's closed. Hopefully easily fixed with the window service.


And another example of window damage: in Bed 2, there's a nail protruding from the frame straight through the top frame. D'oh!


Then there's this issue which might be harder to fix: the ensuite window. I remember the bottom wooden frame for this window was removed at frame stage so the bath hob could be tiled right up to the window frame, but it appears the carpenters forgot to reinforce the bottom edge of the window, as now there's a pretty big bow in the window. Left unsupported, this window could just... fall! Needs fixing; but will probably require removal of some tiles, supporting/fixing the window frame, then repairing the bath hob, re-waterproofing, and re-tiling.



Now this isn't really a problem yet, but the manhole hasn't been put in Bed 4. Normally the manhole to the ground floor roof is in Bed 3, but due to our particular roof design, it needs to go in through Bed 4 robes. Pretty quick & easy job for the carpenters to stick in this manhole, but needs to be done before the electricians come in for fixing, as there's lots of wiring in the ground floor roof they'll need access too. And don't mind the apparent white lines in the robes, it's a reflection of my camera flash against the painted architraves!


Back to the ensuite, the shower niche and around the hob appear to be missing grout - but I've been told the plumbers will do some siliconing, to allow for flexing/movement of the tiles, rather than grout. Hopefully this big gap in the shower niche will be fixed too!



Internal doors: Rumpus room door has a huge crack in the bottom edges, looks like the door is coming apart! Needs to be repaired or replaced. Also the ensuite WC door has horrible dry patches all over it, and a big scar across the master bed door from the inside, both need repainting.


And finally for the day (long post, huh?) the bathroom sink is meant to have a light switch (for a light above the mirror) on one side, and a powerpoint on the other side. However, the electricians were meant to cutout on the walls prior to tiling, so the tiler could leave a cutout for them to get access to the wiring. But since they didn't (forgot?) to expose these switches, I'm not sure how they're going to locate them with the tiling all done! Anyway, not my problem to fix, they'll figure a way out.

Ultimately, these issues are all relatively minor and pretty obvious, and should be straightforward enough to fix. I'd be surprised if Metricon's Quality Assurance people didn't pick these things up before our final inspection, if a layperson can detect them!

And ultimately, we'd rather have all the little things fixed before we get our house - I know for sure that once I'm aware of something that's not 100% right, it'll annoy me forever until it gets fixed!

T&T