I have the most wonderful aunt in the world. She lives down in Arizona. She my uncle spent their careers in Sitka Alaska, both working at a paper mill. After retirement they moved to Washington, and then later down to Arizona. She always types out a Christmas letter to pass around to family. This year it came with a big fat check in it. It takes a big load off my shoulders this time of year when sometimes people don't want you to mess up their house around Christmas time.
I had a laminate floor repair to do yesterday for the local Carpet One store. A plank had started separating where the long hallway meets the large entryway.
Because of my busy year with larger jobs this job has just been put off and off and off. I guess the lady originally complained almost 2 years ago and I've known about this for almost 1 year.
I took my ratchet straps, two tapping bars and Multi Master, hoping the tongue and groove hadn't broken and that it would be repairable. If not then Carpet One would have to replace the living room, kitchen, dining room, hallway and bathroom.
I took some carpet thread and taped it to the floor in the dining room and then pulled it to the far end of the hallway. I wanted to find out why the floor separated. Halfway down the hallway the planks had bowed 3/8 of an inch. I started tapping and tapping and tapping up and down the hallway slowly getting it to move back into alignment. The separation started moving closer together at the entryway / hallway junction but it would not totally close up. There was a stair nose in that area that I could not tap against. I had a couple pieces of trim with me that I'd used for shims on a wood floor installation a year ago. I put an 1/8 inch bead of hot glue down the center of each piece and stuck them to the floor as tapping blocks. I just keep tapping each one of them over and over and over again and the joint totally closed back up. The locking joint was not broken. Before reinstalling the base in the hallway I put a shim between the planks and the wall so the hallway cannot migrate again. It's locked in place on one side now.
Remember way back in the first chapter where I told you I had this wonderful aunt. I'm getting to that.
Since I took the base off the walls to see how big the gap was, I had to reinstall it. I didn't lug my monster compressor over to the job because I didn't know if I could even fix the problem. I live about 4 miles away, so once the floor was fixed, I went home to get my monster Makita compressor and brad nailer. For kicks and giggles I stopped at the tool store. They had an old Makita mini compressor there, still in the box and I asked about why it was discounted. He said it's an old version. The new model was about $40 more. He said actually the discounted one is better than the updated version. They've actually had to send a couple of them back for repairs.
So I bought the discounted one for $179 buckaroos. When I plugged it in you could hardly hear it running. It just purrs. It weighs 25 lb. Oh man, this thing is fantastic.
Merry Christmas to me.
https://www.makitatools.com/products/details/MAC100Q