How difficult can it be to nail down some boards?

I yearn for a 90° angle in my house, or two parallel walls, or a somewhat level floor. Hell, it doesn't have to be level; I'd settle for planar instead of curved.

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Measuring for the cuts

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Making the puzzling cut with a jigsaw, of course.

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There's no way this will work
Here's that first full-length piece of flooring after being cut and hacked and filed to fit around the refrigerator base and trim.



Next time: Installing the floor

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Kitchen floor installation begins

In the beginning . . .
We removed the stove and cleaned up the debris as best we could, then went outside and cut the first plank.

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One down, many to go. I'm using a pneumatic finish nailer and 15-gauge nails every 12 inches or so. No one is measuring. Nothing in this house was measured when it was built in the 1940s, or during its many little additions, so why start now?

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The flooring for the stove recess is complete. Joan has added about three more coats of polyurethane varnish.

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Next: Planning and beginning the main part of the floor.

Kitchen floor: version 28, but who's counting

We've considered ceramic tile, vinyl tile, sheet vinyl, pre-finished wood snap-together boards, industrial locking tile, and others. Most just won't work with the irregular floor, so now we've manufactured our own special 1/4" plywood planks with custom painting and distressing.

Here's Joan with the first coating of primer.

Boards drying after prime coat

Finished boards curing on sun porch

The flooring is made from 1/4" B-C plywood, ripped to 6" and 8" widths by a cheerful Home Depot employee. Joan primed them with diluted black paint, then slapped on a coat of white, then used a scraper, hammer, chain, and other implements of torture to distress the wood.

Next: Installing the floor

Taste is in the mind of the beholder

Tempered glass is expensive
After breaking two windows with pebbles thrown from my mower, I decided to make some protective shutters for grass-cutting days.

But nothing about our house is traditional, so we decided on corrugated metal shutters that rolled on a track.

Front of the house with two shutters installed, plus one shutter (barely visible)
on the side room (right)

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I could have bought the track and the hardware, but why do that when I can spend weeks planning and making them myself. Some of you will  understand. The tracks are made from rusty angle iron and the wheels are from old rolling warehouse ladders. The corrugated metal is—well, just corrugated metal.

These shutters certainly meet my minimum expectations.

Closeup of track and wheels. The axles were made in my shop.

The original sketch and the first of six axles