Building the Loft (part 2)

I’m not sure I shared this but originally, the Pinball room was supposed to be left “out of scope” and out of the budget. I would finish it alone and later

That did not happen.
Thank goodness

As such, planning for finishes, flooring etc. was not done in advance. So as we slowly came to the conclusion that it WOULD get completed (by me) in parallel as the house was getting done, I needed to shift my thinking.

Keeping with that “finish later” mentality, I was originally going to use the raw Advantech OSB flooring and just paint it. Now that we were moving in a get-it-done at the same time direction – I abandoned that approach and started looking for a flooring option.

I found the answer in an unlikely place – Sam’s Club. They had 14MM laminate flooring WITH foam backer “pre-installed” on each piece for about $1.79 Sq/Ft.. So I picked a color (Driftwood) and loaded it up – the picture is just one pallet because each weighs about 2,000lbs. I needed exactly 2 pallets or 132 boxes – too much weight and too big for one load! I actually bought it a few months before I needed it and stored it in the pole barn.

The day we hauled the flooring over to the new Loft was one of the hottest of the year even though it was only mid-May here in east TN. Temps were in the mid 90s and it was humid. Chris put some “funk” on the Apple Music playlist and over the next 4 to 5 hours we hauled every box (2 at a time max) by hand up those long series of steps into the Loft. Each box was heavy enough to make your arms ache after a trip. By the time we moved it all from the Pole barn (touching every box once) and then up into the Loft (touching every box one more time) we were spent.

Prepping the floor was a critical first step before installation. The builders did a great job installing the sub floor but they are never “perfect” I spent a full day grinding, leveling and seating screw heads. If this step is skipped at best you will have a floor that will not “sit down” and will float in areas (cavities) created by the uneven sub-floor below and at worst, you will have screw heads popping through the new laminate.

The very first row, the very first board I used a hammer to “tap” a piece of laminate and “tapped” the end of my finger instead. Ouch. Now I had to install 1,400 square feet of flooring with a busted finger …

Painting and staining was going on in other parts of the house at the same time and for a while the only way INTO the Loft was my extension ladder!

Time to get the LED perimeter lighting installed. At this point I was thinking of using MDF as my wall mounted molding to hold it all – in the end, that’s exactly what I did. My plan was to rip 4″ sections from an 8′ sheet and use my router to create a 10MM mounting channel. Going this route, there would be no need to first add a nailer strip like you do when you install crown for this application. Plus the squared off look of the MDF is more appropriate to the room as I do not have/want crown molding anywhere in the house