The floor is done

At 12:53 PM today, I put the last board in the floor of the living room. Around 2PM, I'd finished taking out the first row and fixing a gap I'd created up there that couldn't be covered with quarter round. I was going to glue in the quarter round, but that seemed to be too messy and permanent. I read that you wanted a brad nailer. The sites I read recommended an air-powered brader if you had a compressor, although they have battery-powered versions too. So, off to Lowes. (I usually prefer Home Depot's products, but Lowes is right across the street, while HD is 20 minutes away. Convenience versus quality, usually.)

At Lowes, they happened to have a Taiwan-special "Tradesman" air-powered brad nailer in the discount pile for $35, which included 1000 of the nails I needed for our project. I could either buy it and a $100 hand-carried air compressor, which would be ready to work the moment I got home, or I could buy a $100 GMC (no, not THAT GMC, it's Lowes' generic tool b rand) battery-powered brad nailer that would take at least 3 hours to charge up and I might not use again before the batteries go bad. Easy choice, I bought the air nail gun and the compressor.

Got home, plugged it in, and had to "test it" by filling a board with brads. No, it might have looked like a guy playing with his toy, but it was tool testing. Honest. :)

About 4:30, I started cutting quarter-round in the downstairs, starting with the square pole in the middle of the floor. I cut all four pieces of it with the power mitre saw I had from a previous project, and nailed it down with the gun. Perfect little holes, waiting for the color-matched putty. For the next 2 hours, I cut quarter round and nailed it down, and covered most of the flaws I'd developed during the floor installation.

I have to put one last piece of quarter round on the door jam on the way out, putty and fill around the bottom of two door frames I didn't fit well enough, and put end pieces of lamina nt coating over the exposed quarter round pieces. Simple stuff. At least until we get to the hallway.....

By 8:30, we had cleaned the floor and garage some, and gotten enough furnature downstairs to call the move-back done. We had already ordered pizza for dinner, but Milady took us and a friend (who had stopped by to help us carry stuff down) to get Krispy Kreme at 10:30PM. I'm still on a carb/sugar buzz 4 hours later....