Fifty-two-year-old bodies, I concluded recently, aren’t ideally suited for the up-and-down work of laying a wood floor. But I’ve spent my adult life as a do-it-yourselfer and sometimes contractor. I enjoy doing my own carpentry work.

In oak, an engineered hardwood floor. Photo, courtesy Hardwood Manufacturers Association

And so, earlier this year, I tackled the floor in the kitchen of my 1872 Victorian home in Maine as part of a top-to-bottom remodel of the room.

I installed glue down, engineered oak flooring. In the rest of this story, I’ll go over why I chose this flooring and why you might (or more likely, might not) want to follow my precise path. And I’ll look at other choices in engineered flooring.

THE OLD DAYS

A decade ago if I’d wanted a hardwood floor in my kitchen, I would have used unfinished tongue-and-groove strip flooring. I would have nailed the floor down, sanded it smooth, and then coated it with three or four layers of urethane.

But that was then. Today, prefinished, engineered hardwood flooring offers a far quicker — and in many ways better  – path to a hardwood floor.

Engineered floors consist of a thin top layer of premium, factory-finished hardwood fused onto a backing of either plywood or high-density fiberboard. They’re attractive, and they’re priced right.

Some types of engineered floors snap together and then float over the subfloor below. Others fit together with traditional tongues and grooves – and are nailed or glued to the subfloor. As for price, expect to pay $2 and up per square foot. Most brands sell for $5 to $6 a square foot, or more if you choose something more exotic for wood than oak or maple.

In short, there are lots of options.

What’s right for you?

INSTALLATION OPTIONS

Glue down engineered flooring comes in strips that are 2 1/4″ to 4″ wide and several feet long. Visually, the effect of a glue down floor is nearly identical to that of a solid-wood strip floor. And these floors feel solid, like a traditional hardwood floor, because they’re glued to the subfloor below them.

Alas, glue down floors are tricky to install. They probably aren’t a good choice for most DIYers unless you have prior experience both with using flooring mastic and also with laying solid-wood flooring.

One reason I say this is that flooring glue is messy stuff. Further, it takes both a fair amount of force to slide the tongues into the grooves of this flooring — and yet both the tongues and the grooves are delicate, because they’re cut from the flooring’s plywood substrate.

So it’s easy to damage glue down flooring as you install it – and easier still to make a mess.

Personally, I used glue down flooring in my own kitchen because I was able to buy it cheaply on closeout –“ and because it was an exact match for full-priced flooring I’d already used in an adjoining sunroom.

Snap-and-lock floating floors are easier (though not easy) to install. The tongues and grooves in these floors snap together and stay together without glue. The floor then floats over its subfloor. In other words, it’s not actually attached to the subfloor.

Installing a floating flooring is easy in a new room with a flat, level subfloor. In this case, you just snap the stuff together, leaving an expansion joint of about a half-inch around the perimeter of the room. You then cover up the expansion joint with a baseboard and other trimwork.

Installing a floating floor in an existing room is more difficult. If the existing subfloor isn’t flat and smooth, a floating floor will let you know it: The floor will feel punky as it flexes up and down over air pockets below.

Also, keep in mind that because floating floors need an expansion joint around their edge, you’ll need either to remove existing door trim, or undercut these trim boards using a backsaw. And you’ll also need to install quarter-round shoe moulding where these floors meet existing baseboards — again to hide the expansion joint.

OTHER BENEFITS & DRAWBACKS

Compared to their solid-wood cousins, engineered floors have other advantages and drawbacks.

On the plus side, these floors handle fluctuations in humidity much better than solid wood floors. This is because glue down engineered floors are made out of plywood, which is dimensionally stable because of its cross-grain construction. As for floating floors with a hardboard substrate, the snap-together joints stay tight … and the entire floor shrinks or expands around the edge of the room, beneath a piece of moulding.

Another nice thing about these floors is their factory finish. Most manufacturers coat their floors with urethane mixed with aluminum oxide. The resulting finish is tougher and more scratch-resistant than anything you could easily apply yourself.

So what’s not to like about engineered floors?

Their greatest weakness is their thin top layer. In some floors, the top layer is 1/16″or less. This makes it too thin to sand and recoat a decade or two down the road, when the factory finish wears out. The veneer layer on better floors is 1/8″ or thicker, and can be sanded and recoated once or twice.

Another drawback is that engineered floors are relatively easy to dent – and unlike solid wood floors, these dents can’t be sanded out. This can pose challenges when you move heavy appliances or furniture or if you have a big dog with claws that need clipping.

NOT QUITE …

A final drawback —  or maybe it’s just a pet peeve — is that some brands of floating floors don’t really look quite like the real thing. Some manufacturers try to mimic the appearance of traditional 2 1/4″ solid wood flooring by gluing three strips of flooring onto a single 7- or 8-inch-wide piece of backing, which is 5 to 8 feet long.

Such floors are quick to assemble, but the joint pattern looks odd. Every five to eight feet, you end up with what looks like three boards butting up against three more boards. This is something you’d never do if you were laying individual strips.

Equally questionable are the lengthwise joints. Every third joint — the one formed by clicking two pieces together –inevitably looks a bit different than the other two. These oddities really call attention to themselves in direct sunlight.

But, if this bothers you, some newer lines of click-and-lock flooring come in individual, three- or four-inch-wide boards.

Our 1872 Victorian home along Maine's Kennebec River.

Seventeen years ago, the previous owners of my house covered up its clapboards with vinyl siding, and they encased many of its trim boards in aluminum.

I’m no fan of installing vinyl siding on old houses.

But, to be fair, the siding guys did a nice job. They worked around — and in no way damaged — the home’s roof brackets and other Victorian embellishments, such as the nicely detailed trimwork above each window. They paid attention to detail.

And I certainly can appreciate why the previous owners decided it was time for a cover-up. Those owners were getting along in  years — and in this part of the world, houses tend to shed their paint rather quickly. Paint might last seven or eight years on new clapboards and trim, but if you own an old house,  you can pretty much resign yourself to a top-to-bottom scrape and paint job every four or five years.

Of course, vinyl isn’t care-free either.

And that’s the subject of this post.

By the time Deb and I bought our house last year, its vinyl siding was dirty and faded. The siding had a glossy sheen when it was new. Now, it was dull and chalky, as was the aluminum trim.

If this describes siding on your house, cleanup is a fairly simple job. All you need are ladders, a hose, and a few household cleaning supplies.

Here’s how I got the siding on my home back into shape:

• First I sprayed it with a garden hose to knock away a little crud, and to get it wet.
• Next I mixed water, some Spic and Span, and a bit of bleach in a pail.  (The bleach would help kill off any minor mildew. )
• Next I donned rubber gloves and scrubbed the siding with sponges and sponge mops. The Spic and Span helped break up and pulled off grime and chalk — while the bleach killed off mold and mildew spores.
• Mildew is especially partial to dark, sheltered places. In a few spots, I needed to spray a concentrated bleach mixture (three parts water to one part household bleach) to kill it off.
• Finally I sprayed the siding a second time with a hose, to finish washing off soap and other debris.

Once I was done, the vinyl siding looked as good as new. Its sheen was back, and its color was far more vibrant than before.

Of course, I also washed aluminum trim while I was at it. The washing job took off the grime and the chalky coating.

Unfortunately, though, the painted aluminum was getting gray with age. And so, as autumn approaches, I’m repainting the aluminum.

But that’s a topic for a future post.

Metal roofs will shed water for a century or more if they’re repainted occasionally. Eventually, though, these old roofs made from tin and its close cousing terne will begin to rust — and leak — if they’re neglected.

Is there any way to save a rusty, leaking metal roof?

A few years back, I wouldn’t have thought so. But that was before I learned about — and used on my own houses – a series of roof restoration paints and fabrics from Preservation Products.

Restoring a metal roof using the company’s products consists of:

1. Scraping and sanding off as much rust and old paint as possible;
2. Once the roof is clean, applying a water-based primer using a roller or a brush;
3. Embedding polyester fabric into this primer anywhere there are holes or worn spots;
4. And finally, applying a couple more layers of water-based paint on top.

Sound simple? It is. And it’s a long-lasting repair too.

Roofs recoated with Preservation Products’ coatings should last a decade or more before they need further maintenance — which itself should involve nothing more than cleaning the surface and adding a new layer or two of paint.

Paint: Heart of the system

Special paints, as you might suspect, are at the heart of this roofing system.

Marketed under the brand name of “Acrymax,” these paints are described by their manufacturer as  “elastomeric” – that is, they keep their elasticity at low temperatures. 

Acyrmax paints resemble (and even smell similar to) water-based acrylic latex house paint. You apply them with a roller or brush, which you clean with soap and water afterward. Aside from the super-stretchy nature of the paint, the key difference between Acrymax and regular paint is that these paints are thicker.

What you end up with, once everything is dry, is a coating of semi-gloss paint that is 25 to 45 mils thick. (By way of contrast, most heavy-duty contractor’s garbage bags are 3 mils thick.)

The products in action

I’ve used Preservation Products roofing systems on several sections of roofs on a pair of 1870s-era Victorian houses.

The first and most ambitious job entailed restoring a metal roof over an 18-by-14-foot sunroom of a Victorian home Deb and I owned until a year ago.

The roof (and the room) dated to around 1900.

When we bought the house in 1989, the roof was leaking badly. It seems that some years earlier, the nearly-flat roof had been enclosed with a fancy Victorian railing. That long-gone railing had been supported by three posts, each of which penetrated the tin roof. At some point in the past, someone had removed the railing and posts — and then done a lousy job patching the three holes left behind by the now-removed posts.

]Now those patches were leaking like a sieve. Worse, it was winter. And we needed to patch the roof so we could repair water damage inside the sunroom. And so we covered the roof with asphalt roll roofing. Our patch job was ugly … but it kept out the ice, snow and rain.

Our hasty patch job lasted for 17 years. But by the spring of 2006 the roof looked like hell. It was time to either repair the old tin roof underneath — or spring for new metal roofing.

And so I tore off the roll roofing, removed hundreds of roofing nails — and then went to restoring the mess underneath.

Scott Bennung, the founder and CEO of Preservation Products, had assured me his company’s materials would allow me to restore the tin roof. I was mighty skeptical. But I decided to give it a try.

Here’s what the roof looked like once I removed the roll roofing. Notice all the nail holes:

Preparation consisted of scraping and sanding off as much rust as possible. To do this, I used a paint scraper and a stiff wire brush. I also wore an OSHA-rated dust mask, because terne (a close relative of tin) contains lead.

Here’s a wider-angle photo of me doing prepwork:

Applying Primer

This was a big job – so I was working directly from a 5 gallon bucket of primer. I applied the primer using a roller that I dipped directly into the bucket.

After the first layer of primer dried, I applied a second — and then while this was still wet, I unrolled and embedded into the wet paint polyester cloth I’d purchased from Preservation Products.

The cloth is similar in consistency to cheesecloth. Its purpose is to add fiber, giving the paint something to adhere to in covering up holes.  (And remember, I had plenty of holes — hundreds of them from nails, and three big ones from where those porch railing posts had once been.)

Getting the fabric in place wasn’t so much tricky as it was messy. I was working, after all, smooshing the sfuff into wet paint.

Next I covered the fabric with another layer of gray primer. The fabric, combined with the multiple coats of primer, had covered up all the holes. I now had a water-tight roof.

Finally, once everything was dry, I applied a top coat of red paint from Preservation Products.

The top coat and the primer are actually the same paint, just tinted differently. The theory is that someday when the red topcoat begins to wear off, I’ll know that it’s time to repaint.

I was pleased as could be with the finished roof. All of the seams from the old terne roofing telegraphed straight through the layers of paint and fabric I’d applied. And that, of course, was my intent:

To transform my rusty, leaky metal roof into something that looked nice — and which doesn’t leak.

Smaller jobs

Since doing this first job, I’ve done several smaller jobs using leftover materials.  Two of these jobs consisted of cleaning up metal roofs over Victorian bay windows. The other two were terne roofs covering entry vestibules.

Two of the roofs had been gooped with roof tar at some point in the past, while the other two had been kept covered up with paint. In each case, preparation was similar to what I’ve described above: Plenty of scraping, sanding and cleaning.

But with these smaller roofs, I didn’t need to add fabric, because none of them had leaks or badly rusted places. And so, in each case, I applied a layer of primer and two coats of finish paint.

The cool thing about these smaller jobs was that in a couple hours’ time, I was able to transform ugly, peeling roofs into crisp roofs that look as good as new, and which shouldn’t need any further attention for another decade or more.

I like that.

You might not think so as you read stories about home builders going bankrupt and foreclosures reaching record levels.

But, at least according to a recent New York Times story, things aren’t all that bad at big box retailers such as Home Depot and Lowes.

The story suggests that many homeowners are moving away from big-ticket discretionary remodeling projects and toward smaller repair projects. In a word, they’re buying things like toilets.

 “Customers are moving away from discretionary projects and are spending money on small repair projects,” Carol B. Tomé, Home Depot’s chief financial officer, told the Times. “Plumbing is as basic as it can get in terms of repair. It outperformed the company average.”

Another trend at Home Depot and Lowes as cold approaches and energy prices remain stuck at record highs: Homeowners are buying energy-savers such as weatherstripping, CFL light bulbs and pipe insulation.

(Actually, to look at the two companies’ sales numbers, people must be buying lots and lots of toilets and light bulbs. Home Depot, for instance, sold $21 billion of stuff in the second quarter of this year …. and turned a profit of $1.2 billion after taxes.)

Granite holds up to heat. It’s hard to scratch. And it comes in hundreds of colors and styles — nearly all of them shiny and pretty.

Of course, solid granite countertops are also mighty expensive. Typically, they cost $75 to $150 per square foot, meaning they add thousands of dollars to the price of a kitchen job. You could trim the cost some by installing the countertops yourself, but this isn’t exactly a job most do-it-yourselfers will feel comfortable with.

So what are your options if you’re a do-it-yourselfer with an eye for granite but a budget that dictates something less expensive?

Our granite tile countertops

That was the question Deb and I faced when we rebuilt a large kitchen in our old house.

After exploring many options, we decided that I would build our own countertops using 12 by 12 inch granite tiles.

Tradeoffs?

We knew going into this project that our countertops wouldn’t have exactly the same look as ones made from large slabs of granite. Granite slabs, after all, are usually six feet or more long and two feet wide. These slabs give you long runs of seemless countertops.

Our countertops, by contrast, would have grout lines every foot. And their front edge would be crafted from hardwood moulding rather than stone.

So we knew there would be compromises.

But, as it turned out, I think the job couldn’t have turned out any nicer.

Our countertops are shiny and handsome and practical. They’ll last every bit as long as the cabinets that support them.

And the price was right, too.

The price is right

We spent slightly less than $400 for about 40 square feet of counters and backsplashes. That’s about $10 a square foot — or, roughly what we would have spent to buy post-formed laminte countertops.

And the nice thing about working with granite tile is that this is a job that most do-it-yourselfers could tackle with ease.

Next time I’ll explore the “how-tos” of this job.