Every floor is under construction at once. Or maybe I should say “the floor of every floor”… as in, the basement floor, the first-floor floor, and the attic floor. Let’s tackle them one by one.

D.D. took a jackhammer to the basement floor. Previously a section of this slab sloped up at the base of the old stairs, forming a bumpy landing. Bob suspected the house was built atop an erratic boulder nobody wanted to move at the time, and D.D. basically removed the protruding part, kicking up lots of choking dust in the process. Now instead of a bump the basement has a hole – we’ll have to do something about that.

In the living room we’re gradually replacing the old floorboards with a modern plywood subfloor. Mark and Paté figured out how best to remove the floorboards, working a couple of pry-bars between the bottom of each board and the joists below. There’s actually another subfloor below the floorboards, which we left in place because (I guess) it smoothes out the unevenness of our joist timbers. After removing enough floorboards to expose a four-foot-wide segment, we cut ¾-inch plywood sheets to create the new floor, and so on.

The attic flooring and the living-room finish ceiling will be two styles of tongue-and-groove floorboards. D.D., Paté, and I made an assembly line to hoist the flooring from Bob’s trailer around the house, up through the attic window, and stacked onto “stickers” so all sides can dry and acclimate to the indoor environment before we install it. Underneath, Hans installed cleats on both sides of the joists so we’d have a place to nail the ceiling. He called ceiling-board measurements up to me (often with “short” and “long” edges since the joists bend a little) and I cut them on the chop saw, then passed ‘em back down for installation.