Our Home Was Broken! We Pulled Up All Our Floors!

Testing, testing, paintbrush. Apparently we have got to go backwards before we go forward. What happened to the living room? So what did happen to our home? We had a beautiful living room. We had an okay kitchen but we wanted a brand new kitchen and to do that we did need to level the floors. The fireplace didn't really work anymore. It was completely rusted and burnt out. It was coming out anyway. So we decided let's kill this big brick structure and put something a little bit more slimline in place. Did you spot a little bit of remnants from the old kitchen? It's still got the garlic hanging on the wall. Like a lot of things in old homes that maybe not built to the same standard we build things to today, it wasn't that hard to pull all those bricks apart. But now it's time to start ripping up these floorboards. You can probably see how much the floor is still flexing as we pull each board up. We did unveil yet another issue with the flooring once we started to pull these floorboards up and that is the joists. So that's all of the hardwood timber that you can see here. You can see as we pull the floorboards up, the camera shakes. That's probably because they're not fastened to the bearers very well. We did end up pulling all of the joists up and replacing them just to get it all perfect and level to get to our floorboards. All right, time to get some sheets down. You want a screw? Meant to be 150 nails and then screws. I reckon we put one, two, three, four, two screws in each joist and then just... 150 nails. Meant to be 150 nails, yeah. You might notice that this is not your standard yellow tongue going down. So the R-Floor Radiant Barrow Flooring, it's a particle board flooring, the same as yellow tongue, but it's got a foil laminated on the underside of the flooring board. It does have a Bell 29 fire rating and it also claims to have 80% less moisture uptake through the bottom surface compared to other subfloor products. It also acts as slight vapour barrier. It goes down exactly the same as normal yellow tongue. We are going through a lot of glue, a lot of screws, a lot of nails. It is the subfloor. It is everything that's going to hold the engineered boards on top. If the bits underneath move, the bits on top move and it's not good. I'm glad we did replace all of the timber under here. You can see it's much neater. Spacings are better than what it was before and at least it's flat. Lulu, you're filthy. Here we go in the car. Filthy mud. Look at these bloody dogs. Filthy, filthy dogs. What happened to the living room? I don't know. This happened to the living room. Number one question on Instagram. What did you do to the floors? I didn't do anything to the floors. I've just been an innocent bystander. What did you do to the floors? We had to rip them up. I mean, they don't look good yet, but they do actually feel better. Part of the problem. So we spent all this time re-stumping the whole house, trying to get it perfectly level. And then we realised there's massive gaps in all the floorboards. So there was cracks that opened up. There was cracks that was already there. There was gaps around the edges and the floors were still not flat. See, all our floors are out of level. The plan was to always rip them up, get some solid flat base down and get some nice new boards down. One, seal it up. Two, so we can put some insulation under it later, but mostly just to get it dead flat and level as a good base, mostly because we're spending so much money, time and effort on that in the kitchen. Yeah, 100%. So number one goal, insulation and get this thing sealed up. So we've actually used a very good product on the floor here. This is a slightly different product to Yellow Tongue. It's got a foil backing and it's got a different glue and treatment through it. It's actually for termite protection, but it also provides, I think it's like a 0.2 R value increase in your insulation, which is not much, but everything helps around here. Stage three, we'll get under the house again. And we'll get some bats under there. This went under a huge dip here. Yeah, that was the biggest problem. Biggest problem area. Well, actually, no, that's not true. Over here, the whole house just sag from one corner into the middle and to the other corner. Actually, there's a section in the re-stumping video when I was watching it and you can literally see that whole side of the house just being jacked up. It's incredible. So we fixed all that. Big tick. Excellent. When we ripped up the floor, it's like everything in this house, all the timber that they used was all locally milled and it was all different sizes. So all the joists, some of them were 100 mil, some of them were 90 mil, some of them were 95 mil and it would have taken us probably a week to straighten it and flatten it. So we knocked all of them out as well. It only took a day, day and a quarter to get the new ones down and then a day to get all these sheets down. And so we're standing under the elephant in the room. Should have knocked it out. Do you still hate this room? I want to chop it down. I do not like it at all. So guess what? Getting vetoed one day. Yeah, I know. You're going to have to do it later. I actually, I do stand corrected. It's too low. The loft has to go. It's way too low. Yeah, but it's also holding up the roof. It is holding up the entire house. We should have knocked down the loft. We should have gone to town. We are doing this in like, we're going to have to do like three part stages of this build. Anyway. However. I'm living here. I'm not. Need to keep some space. Can you show me the flooring? Yeah. So there's a lot of variation in it, but that's what we wanted. That's really nice. A lot of these engineered boards just look too perfect. Yeah. Whereas this one has all grains. It just suited the house a bit more, didn't it? Oh yeah. Yeah. That's the good thing about this stuff is the variation in it. A lot of blonde and red ones. Yeah. The dark ones are quite, they're the best ones. Biggest question is what do we want straight across the big door? It's like the most important. I think we probably just want something like that. Do you want to pick the first board? I really like that color. I reckon it's going to look better against the black button and we can stagger all the other ones in. Good veins in it. But getting the floors down, it's a little bit of hard work. A lot of time on your knees, a lot of time troweling really thick sticky glue. But the most important part is getting that first run correct. So that's why we use the sausage and not the big tub of glue. I was quite picky with the first row of the floorboards. It's going to be against that nice new timber sliding door. When we get around to it, we're going to have to just try and avoid any repetitive patterns and then big patches of same same. Freddie was here helping me again today. It is a two-man job. Makes it go a lot quicker than trying to do something like this yourself. We did knock out most of this room. We spent two days total. We have gone for a direct stick method, which means gluing the entire subfloor and the board. All we do is pour out enough glue to trowel and do a couple of rows at a time. And then as we bang the boards in to get a nice tight fit, these boards are actually really good quality. There was no gaps. They went together quite easily. They were dead flat across all of them. There's no variation in height or anything, so there's no little lips at the joins. I was really happy with where they went down. But we do glue them down and then pin nail them in place, mostly just to let the glue go off so they don't move while the glue's going off. All right, you got an order to your madness? Yep. That's first row, second row, third row. Sweet. So we're going to get three rows. We're only going to glue up to the squiggly line. One, two, three. Fourth will be later because we'll have to rip it. But yeah, three will go all the way. Cool. Oh, I'll get this glue down. Got my knee pads on again to see if I don't remove more skin from my knees. It turns to crap quickly once you open it, doesn't it? The rubber seal's popped out of the lid. I've got a feeling this isn't going to pour at all. Oh, man. Oh, no. Don't put your hand in the glue. Don't know how it happens. Keep cleaning my hands, but they're black. Thick, heavy, cold glue today. We did complete these floors in two days. It was a big couple of days. You can see the last few boards are going down, and it's pitch black outside. But the most satisfying board is to come. Oh, last one. If this doesn't go in, I'm going to be so upset. Oh, no. What's your tolerance like? She'll go. Always going to be a hard one, the last one. Yeah, it'll work. Oh, that's a good Friday feeling. Very satisfying job to get the floors done, but that's only part of the job. We've got the kitchen to go in, finish the living room. Still got to finish the laundry. Stay tuned.