photos of the flooriing (random IV)

This is one corner of the office and shows how crooked the flooring was. The original flooring installer (who is no longer an Authorized Dealer :) said the walls were crooked. I would be surprised if they were this crooked!


I recaulked under the laundry room door. I removed the old caulking and found it was wet under there, so left it to air dry for a couple of days before I recaulked it.


We walked around the lake and saw these footprints. My guess is raccoons.


This is the closet in the master bedroom. Isn't the new floor gorgeous?

Random order. Part IV.

photos of the flooriing (random III)

The manufacturer's rep had originally said that we could keep the old flooring for when we refinished the basement, unfortunately things changed. The old flooring had to go back to the manufacturing plant for technical evaluation. I helped the installers box it up for easier shipment (repacked it into the boxes the new stuff came in).


We have had gorgeous weather. The leaves are turning giving us brilliant yellows, golds and oranges. The reds are just starting to come out. Hopefully we will not get a lot of wind so we can enjoy the colours for a while.

Random order. Part III.

photos of the flooriing (random II)

Tawny showing how the floor is bulging. This is because the flooring was so poorly installed.


The old flooring has been removed and the new flooring is laid out ready to start putting down.


Tawny and Taz kept bothering the installers, so they were relegated to the couches in the office, with me.


One of the extras of having a gas stove is you have to call the gas people to disconnect and reconnect your stove. The yellow line is a stainless steel gas line. This shows the old flooring so this is a before photo.

Random order. Part II.
(need to be put in proper order later)

photos of the flooriing (random I)

Tawny.


This shows the new flooring (in the kitchen, closer to the camera) has a lower sheen than the old flooring.


This photo shows the guys when they are starting to remove the old flooring.


This shows the stacks of new flooring in the hallway and dining room. There was more stacked in the hallway, out of sight.

Random order. Part I.

Flooring update

Today Peter and Conrad removed all the old flooring from the master bedroom (and closet) and the kitchen, eat-in area, and family room. They also installed the new flooring in the family room, the kitchen, and almost completed the eat-in area. They are coming back tomorrow (Thurs) to complete the eat-in area and the master bedroom. The new floor looks quite nice. As the previous flooring was no longer available, we had to choose something different. The new stuff was as close to the previous as we could pick (in grain and colour), but is darker. We are glad that it still matches everything quite nicely.

WOOHOO!!! Finally!

It's been over 2 1/2 years since we first noticed the flooring troubles. The original installer claimed he had done everything right and the problems we were having (floor humping up, and large cracks) were because we weren't dehumidifying or humidifying the house properly. Well, it's impossible to control the humidity in a house to the extent he needed. He actually had told us to turn on the floor heat at the same time as the air conditioner (floor at 26C and air con at 22C). Besides wasting energy, it was only a temporary solution.

Finally, the manufacturer, TORLYS, acknow;edged the floors were improperly installed and agreed to provide replacement flooring and cover the labour to remove the old flooring and install new stuff.

The new flooring was delivered this morning. The installation starts tomorrow. The first phase will cover the master bedroom and kitchen and family room area. The we get to move all that furniture back and empty the dining room and spare bedrooms.

Hopefully this will go smoothly (cross your fingers!).

Fixing up the caulking (part I)

One of the big problems we had with our terrible builder was the caulking which was incredibly poorly done. Since we were forced to take responsibility to correct the deficiencies, we had to fix the caulking problems too. I have been working on it a little bit at a time, when I am able. I haven't posted hardly anything to the blog for almost two months so this represents work that has been done in that time. This doesn't show the six weeks of running around and back and forth it took to get the right brand and colours of caulking. (You have to use the same brand/colour to do any patches otherwise it will be very obvious.)

This is the base of the laundry room door. I don't know why the caulking failed so dramatically here. If we had rain with wind, we would sometimes get water on the laundry room floor - not sure if it was from this failed caulking or from the poor caulking that runs underneath the threshold (it had holes/gaps in it).

You can't put new caulking over old otherwise your new caulking is no better than the old stuff. So I had to remove the old caulking (wasn't too hard), clean out the area (there was a lot of sand and other dirt/debris in there which would prevent the caulking from sticking), and then apply the new caulking. Believe it or not, the original caulking that I removed was white, as I could tell when I peeled it off.

This is the outside of the doors to the family room. I applied a small bead of white caulking between the green brick mold and the white door jamb. There is not supposed to be a gap there, but obviously the brick mold was loosened when the door was installed.

This was one of the cracks that I had complained to Tarion about. There was just a small crack at the time and Tarion said it was a normal shrinkage crack. I thought it was a bit bigger than I would have expected for that, but since Tarion's inspectors are supposedly experts, I had to take their word for it (had no choice, actually). Clearly the mortar was too dry and it had just fractured and disintegrated.


This is what the crack looked like after I cauked it. I would have preferred it if it had straight edges and was neater.

That's all the caulking fixups that I have been able to do so far. There will be a part II, stay tuned but don't hold your breath.

Of course, I have to end with a picture of the doggies. Sadly, none of the pictures of Tawny were very good so I have chosen this one of Taz enjoying his rawhide "bone".

October 4 - Panorama

We were going for a walk and Tawny took off to take a dip in the water, and grab a stick while she was at it.

Some kind of critter had obviously been in the grass here at the lookout as Tawny and Taz spent a couple of minutes sniffing around here. I cut the grass here after the walk, so it looks much nicer. It was a bit tricky as I had to avoid the frogs as they were jumping around, being scared by the mower.

This is one of those wacky panoramas - the road is straight, not a 90 degree turn as you might guess from this photo.