Building Nelson!: Post-Handover

Tuesday, 9 December 2014

Queensland Spotted Gum Hardwood Floor, Poly Gloss Finsih

I wish I was writing this post under different circumstances. We must have done something to insult the universe because we are being seriously punished at the moment. I will write a longer post next regarding this but it is with utter dismay and with the heaviest of hearts that I say that our stunning Spotted Gum flooring has been destroyed. It has all happened in the last 2 days and we are still in the process of going through it all but a brand new, yet defective dishwasher has slowly leaked water under our flooring for the past 2 weeks (unbeknownst to us). It has completely destroyed the floor, which will all need to be ripped up. It flooded through 2 rooms into the study and saturated the carpet there. Fischer and Paykel had their head guy come out and they found a broken pipe inside. We are completely devastated and its going to be a long journey to get back to where we are now. Our painter just finished filling and painting the skirting boards last week and we were finally ready to set all our furniture out. Instead we will soon need to begin packing again.

Here is the flooring prior to this week (we only had 1 week of them). It turned out better than we had imagined and we could not have been happier with the final result. It was stunning.

Harwood timber flooring - QLD Spotted Gum 80 x 14mm select/standard mix
We deleted flooring in our Carlisle contract (to entry, hall, meals, kitchen and lounge) and then had our own company install the floors.

Flooring Timeline

31st October - Handover - got keys
3rd November - Flooring laid - took 1 week to lay
We moved into the house (partly) on 7th November - floors were not sanded or polished
Flooring then sat to allow them to acclimatise to the temperature and ensure minimal movement (as they came from Queensland) - nearly 2 weeks
19th November - we moved out and floors were sanded and polished. After polishing we couldn't move back for an extra 3 days to allow time for it to dry and set (also highly toxic)
We moved back into the house on the 24th November
(See now why I haven't had many posts!!!)
We have been in the house just over 2 weeks....

Flooring Process

Concrete scraped and cleaned
Protective plastic laid
12mm layer of ply - screwed to the slab (what appeared to be 1000 screws!)
QLD Spotted Gum timber glued and secret nailed
Sanded and polished with 3 coats of solvent poly gloss finish

Protective Plastic Goes Down

Ply is Laid

Timber Gets Delivered!! It was soooo exciting seeing the timber. It gave us a good idea of the colour and what the end result would look like (this photo is in the garage under fluorescent lights).We were so excited by the colour variation and the feature to the timber. Timber really is an absolutely beautiful product.

More Natural Light

Here we Go!!! Goose bumps when we saw the first parts down!

The Next Night

So much completed in a day! These photos are under light at night time

While the floorers laid the floors during the night. I went back to the house at night and painted all the skirting boards! Enamel paint fumes in a garage send you a little crazy after a while!!

*Because our flooring was laid after hand-over and did not want quad on the floor under any circumstances, we had Carlisle leave the skirting boards off to all of the ground floor. They left us all the skirting boards in the packets and the paint to paint them. It was a bit painful at the time to try and get them done but the end result was worth it all. To avoid quad around the kitchen the floorer used caulking. Its a timber matched silicone that fills in the small gap needed to allow for movement.