Shabin Floor

Progress continued on the shabin, albeit slowly. We went on two separate week long beach vactions since my last post, so time has been short to either go up to the shabin or post about it. We made it up there once more in June and one weekend in July. Both weekends turned out to be 100+ degrees, and the good news was that camping was not so terrible in the hot weather. With a fan going in the shabin, I could work pretty comfortably. In truned out that Carleigh loves swimming in the river, so she and Lizz spent most of the days down there enjoying the cold mountain water. I also appreciated being able to cool off after a day's work in the heat.

I decided that the next project for the shabin would be a finished floor downstairs. This is the opposite of typical house construction, in which one usually does the floors last. My reasoning was that we wanted to use the shabin for camping as we went along. A floor makes it possible to put a real mattress down, and get a reasonably comfortable place to sleep and change clothes.  We tried tent camping with air mattresses, and that was simply not very comfortable and it took a lot of effort erecting and dissassembling the tent that could be better spent on finishing the shabin.

I found Lumber Liquidators to be a good source of inexpensive flooring. Choosing from their clearance section, I chose an engineered wood floor for the downstairs, and a laminate floor for the loft.  An engineered wood floor is basically thin plywood planks, with a finished hard wood top layer. I found a really nice one that has a hand scraped hickory finished layer. This should provide a nice, rustic feeling.  A laminate floor is also composed of wood, but with an aritficial top layer that looks like wood. I chose one that looks like Brazilian cherry.



The hickory floor is a snap together, floating floor, meaning that it does not require any adhesive or nails to install. It is a good idea to use an underlayment, as that provides a cushioning layer to improve the feeling and sound of the floor when one walks on it. I chose an underlayment that also adds some insulation as well as a vapor barrier.  The underlayment is simply rolled out and cut to length on the floor, and the seams taped. You can see my first two rows above.



Here you can see the underlayment almost complete. The niche in the back corner is going to be the closet for the toilet. The flooring is still in its boxes, stacked up where the kitchen will be.



Once the underlayment was down, I could start installing the floor. Since all I had to do was snap it together, the work was a matter of selecting random lengths of flooring to stagger the pieces, and cutting the last piece in each row to fit. As a floating floor, it requires room to expand due to temperature and moisture, so I mainted a gap between the floor and all walls using shims, which you can just see around the edges in the picture above. I am really happy with the way the floor looks.

Along with the floor, I also spent a good deal of time sealing up openings into the shabin using sealant and lumber. The outside door in the rear of the cabin is not air tight, but is just a basic shed door.  The closet itself was not sealed. This alows ants to find their way in, and in addition to working on the floor I found myself fighting their colonization efforts.  All in all, it took both weekends to get the floor laid, which amounted to about two full days of work. By the second weekend, however, we had a mattress down and spent our first night in the shabin.

We are planning to go back up this weekend. I will be starting the next project, which is to finish the loft. I plan to move our mattress up there as soon as the stairs are installed and the floor is laid. That will free up downstairs space, which is pretty crowded between the king sized mattress and all the tools.  Look for an update after the weekend.