When Things go Awry

So the other day I got up and was raring to get out into the studio and start hammering. I feel like I’ve been slacking on my metalwork, getting pulled away in too many other directions. I really need to be getting some hammering done, both because it’s what pays my bills and I’ve got several galleries needing to be restocked! I’m feeling the pressure and guilt of not getting enough done. So I’m ready to head out the front door and go to the studio. “Oh, that doesn’t look good.” “Hmm…” Yep, the front door won’t open!

Several years back I spent a bunch of money to buy some beautiful strand woven bamboo flooring to replace the ugly vinyl and bare plywood I had been living with. (The bare plywood was because I ripped up even uglier, truly nasty carpet when I put in a wood stove.) This flooring is what’s known as a floating floor in that it basically just sits on top of the existing floor. The planks are cleverly engineered to sort of snap together and lock in place such that the only board that comes out easily is the last one laid down. It’s not too hard for a handy person to lay the floor themselves, and naturally that’s what I did. However, I didn’t take seriously enough the manufactures recommendation of leaving 1/2 inch space all around for potential expansion. That much isn’t really needed is it?

Well, you can probably guess where this is going. Yeah, a healthy gap for expansion was needed. Around fall each year the rainy season starts. The air gets really humid and the temperature differentials between the outdoors and indoors of my place result in those boards absorbing a lot of moisture and expanding. I’d get a bit of a buckling bulge in the floor near the front door. It wasn’t too bad. I could live with it, and did for years.

Late last fall I built the rocket mass heater in my living room. Much of the floor expansion had already taken place at that time. I wondered if the heavy mass of the heater would actually solve the issue by holding down the floor. It seemed like maybe it was, there was only a little bulge.

This year has been the first fall when the heater was in place before the cold moist weather arrived. The buckle returned, and it returned with a vengeance! The mass of the heater does hold that section of the floor flat though, which is nice. It also prevents the expanding floor boards from relieving stress in that direction, concentrating the swelling in a smaller area. This resulted in a massive buckling of the floor. It was becoming a tripping hazard! Still I was living with it until it that day it increased to the point it had lifted up edge molding high enough to block the front door!

I was able to just pull of the molding and have a functional door again thankfully. However, this clearly was an issue I couldn’t keep ignoring. Fussing with it some more I actually managed to unlock a couple boards from each other in the middle of the floor. That was a bad thing since despite trying I couldn’t get them to lock back together. They just aren’t designed to do that. Argh!!! I don’t want to deal with this now! I need to get out to the studio and do some real work, work that can make me some money! My mind wasn’t settling in well to the new reality of my day.

I contemplated a couple half measures, but eventually resigned myself to doing what needed to be done. In order to really fix this I had to haul everything out of the kitchen, including the gas stove, tear up the entire floor back to the front door, and lay it back down again. Upset at not getting metalwork done in the studio I began this task.

First everything came off the kitchen floor and got packed into the living room. That did involve shutting off the gas line and unhooking the stove. Then all the edge molding had to be carefully removed. I’m proud that I actually managed to do this without breaking any of them, allowing me to reuse every piece! Let me tell you getting those first boards out was a royal pain in the butt!! They were wedged up tight against the cabinets where there is a bit of an overhang preventing me from easily getting tools in to pry them up. I wasn’t thinking about the blog at this point and thus didn’t take any photos. My mind was still on not getting “real” work done.

Once those first boards were finally free it began to go really easy. As I mentioned before the planks are engineered to have the end boards go down and come up with little effort. I almost started making a big pile of them, then thought I should probably number each one so I don’t have a big jigsaw puzzle to do when I’m trying to lay them back down. I got out some tape to use when numbering them.

By this point I had managed to shift my mood. This was my days task. No metalwork was going to get done. I wasn’t going to be making any money today. I was resigned to this.

When I first laid the floor, and again had the stove out for that I had noted that the copper gas line feeding it had a scary looking kink in it. Being somewhat familiar with copper I recognized that it wouldn’t take too much more flexing of that kink to create a crack in the metal, which I would rank as a very bad thing for a gas line. At the time back then I just carefully put the stove back in place. I admit, I was being lazy. I didn’t want to try replacing the whole copper line.

Since that time I’ve learned a few more things, like how to make a flare fitting, and that there are such things as flexible gas lines designed to more easily hook up to appliances such as a stove. Since my day was blown and the stove was already unhooked I decided I should fix this issue too. So I went to the hardware store and got the appropriate parts I needed.

With a bit of work with a pipe cutter and my flaring tool I bought for another homestead project a while back I had the kink cut out and the flexible hose added on.

I got the stove back in place and hooked up again. I’ve attached enough torches to gas tanks through the years though to know you need to test for leaks. I’m never really comfortable when dealing with gas lines, which I would say is a good thing. So I went out to the studio and got my leak detecting solution to apply to all the joints.

It’s a good thing I checked because sure enough there was a small leak. What happens with the detection solution is that a bunch of little bubbles form. I’m pretty sure the solution is just a soapy water that will bubble when a gas blows through it.

So I went and redid the troublesome connection retesting until it was no longer leaking. The new flexible hose did make hooking everything back up so much easier. As an added bonus I could now push the stove all the way back. Previously the solid copper tubing prevented this due to where the bends were.

The floor boards went back into place pretty quickly and easily, at least until I got to the binding points. There I had to do some measuring and then take the pieces out to the wood shop to be trimmed. Around the floor vents I had to completely redo and replace a couple boards because things had shifted so much by that point. Fortunately I saved all my extra boards from originally doing the floor for just such potential future needs so this wasn’t a problem. Those last boards and the end of the run, yeah, I had to trim off about 1/2 inch. It would seem the manufacturer knew what they were talking about when making their recommendations.

Then it was just a matter of getting all the molding back in place and moving everything back in. The whole project did end up taking all day. Was it a wasted day?

Over the course of the day I came to see all this in a different light from where I started. At first I was upset I was losing a day of productive, income generating work. By the end of the day I had a different attitude. It required me to shift my thinking in the sort of way I was talking about in my previous post about Minding the Gap. My financial goals are not really to make more money, or to spend less. My goal is to keep the gap between income and expenses as wide as possible. This is where savings and security exist.

I have a good friend who has been engaged in a major remodeling project of his home. I’ve been hearing all the stories of the contractors he’s dealing with. What made my mood better throughout my day was the realization that if I was hiring someone to fix my floor, so I could go work in the studio instead, I would have been paying hundreds of dollars, if not thousands. I might not have even saved much time when I factored in all the effort it takes around here just to get a contractor to return your calls, much less come and do the job. My floor would have been torn up for a month at least, if not more. (Hint for those looking for career opportunities. There’s lots of need for reasonably skilled contractors in many areas!)

So instead of seeing my studio day being wasted in work that didn’t generate income I realized I was seeing far more “profit” that I ever would have at the rates I charge for my work. All told I spent about $25 on parts for fixing the gas line. My days worth of labor saved me from narrowing my income/expense gap by several hundred dollars. To top it all off, I got the job done immediately instead of being frustrated for weeks trying to get someone to do the work! So it wasn’t a wasted day. In fact it was one of the most lucrative and productive days I’ve had in quite a while.

When things go awry I need to remember to check my emotions, pull back, and look at the bigger picture. When viewed from a different perspective sometimes the outlook can be radically shifted as happened this day. It was a bad day for income generation. However, it was financially a freaking awesome day for my greater goal of Minding the Gap! In the process I got to further develop a few skill sets as well. Of course, the other moral to this story is that it’s a good idea to pay attention to the manufacturers guidelines to begin with when installing flooring!

Studio Snippet

I’ve got nothing much exciting to write for this studio snippet. I’m just sharing one of the pieces I’m working on, which I do think is exciting. At least I’m quite pleased with how it’s coming along. This is probably my most labor intensive design style at this point. There is a lot of intricate designing and chasing involved in making it happen.

I’m happy to have a site where I can again allow comments. (I had to shut them off on my main website because the spam was simply uncontrollable!) So please I encourage you to share thoughts of your own. My general rule about comments though is just to play nice. Differing views are fine, but I’m not interested in engaging in or moderating verbal fights. If I feel things get out of hand, by whatever criteria I decide, I’ll just start blocking or deleting things.