Threshold Floored

We've been getting remarkably little done on the house lately, in part because I got hit over the head with a bunch of cooking that needed doing (mostly preserving stuff, so the kitchen has been a jelly factory for the last week).

Despite that, Noel squeezed in this little project literally under my nose (what you cannot see in these photos is a large vat of boiling jelly right over his head).

We'd finally decided to not try to slope the pantry floor up to meet the kitchen floor. It was going to be too complicated and we have plenty of level changes in the floors around the house that have not yet proved to be more than just a pain in the butt. So finishing the threshold was just a matter of adding a piece of plywood to match the pantry floor, and then tiling over it.

Noel started by measuring and cutting out a new piece of plywood to fit in the threshold of the pantry. But when he test-fitted it, it was a bit high, so there was a brief interlude during which he removed the old linoleum with a spatula.

Further fit errors were easily corrected by more firmly screwing the plywood to the floor.

Then a cleanup, a sand, and a vacuum for good measure, and he was ready to lay tile. Well, for peel-n-stick values of tile, that is.

This tile was the last tile from the one box we bought for the room. We had enough chunks to fill it all in, technically, but we bought a whole second box for the single tile we needed to finish the job. Fortunately, we actually have a use for those tiles, as we have several loose tiles in other parts of the house. It'll look a bit funky, but the tiles look funky anyway because normal people do not put vinyl flooring in every room of the house.

Noel used up little pieces left over from the edge of the room behind the fridge to fill in the last bit. We had quite a few of these and I hate wasting something like that that seems to be inherently useful.

Then, almost before I expected it, the floor was done! We just need a little metal threshold to deal with the level change from room to room, and we're good.

Technorati Tags: flooring

posted by ayse on 12/21/08