Flooring

Now for the big job, putting in 1,000 square feet of flooring. For a couple years I had been keeping my eye on some new products for installing flooring over concrete. Two competitors existed, SubFlor and DriCore. These are two-foot square flakeboard pieces with plastic "feet" to hold them up above the concrete surface.

The plastic feet provide a dead air space under the sub flooring, helping with insulation. The plastic provides a vapor barrier effect as well. In addition, if a minimum amount of water should leak in, the lift of the feet will provide a place for that water to work its way to the floor drain. However, understand that we are talking very small amounts of water! Nothing is going to be much help if you have the Mississippi river coming in your window.
We ended up going with DriCore mainly because of superior distribution. When we contacted SubFlor, we learned that the product was not yet in the local Lowes stores, but would be "soon". What soon meant was not clear. When I talked with DriCore, they also revealed that the local stores did not yet have product, but they immediately put me in contact with a Home Depot in Nebraska that would ship it to me. Shipping was a little high, but I really wanted to use this since I intended to lay down bamboo flooring.
The DriCore instructions actually suggest that you install the product on the floors first, and then build your walls on top of it. That does not work well here in Colorado, since our expansive soils demand the construction of floating walls. What this meant to me was that I had to cut the DriCore to get it through doorways and such

Kind of a pain, and certainly time consuming. However, a jig saw with an aggressive tooth profile cuts both the flake board and the plastic subsurface just fine.
The edges of the panels are tongue and grooved. A simple blow from a rubber mallet would drive the panels together, locking them quite tightly.

I used a small scrap stick to keep from hitting the panel edges themselves. I figured that the blows could not be helpful for the tongues!

You can see some odd panels up against the walls on the edges of the room. The instructions called for a 1/4" gap between the edge of the drywall and the edge of the DriCore. I accomplished this gap by placing these scrap bits of 1/4" hardboard as shims.

Basement - Bamboo planks

After the DriCore, I began installing the bamboo flooring. I purchased the planks from BuildDirect, who had the best prices I could find. You had to purchase a minimum order of 1,200 square feet, but that was about what I needed and the cost, even with shipping, was 30% less than the local supplier.

Bamboo is available in two colors, a yellow that is similar to maple, and a brown that seems like a dirty white oak. Bamboo is too dense to stain well, so they create the dark brown color by heating the wood until it begins to char, then stopping. They call this "lightly toasted" treatment carbonizing. However, that word apparently doesn't translate well from the Chinese.

I installed the bamboo with an air powered flooring nailer.

The work went pretty fast, this was the results of the first hour
.
The highlight of this bit was for my daughters. The boards were small enough that they could help lay them out for Daddy, a task that they loved.


But by the end of the day, they'd had it!

Hey, this place is looking finished!

How to create an "airbrushed" look

How to create an "airbrushed" look

1. Load your image into PaintShop Pro
2. In the Layer window, right-click on the image and select "Duplicate"
3. With the new layer selected, right-click in the Layer window and select "New Mask Layer", "From Image", select "Luminance" as the Source and then OK.
4. Right click in the new mask group and select "Merge", "Merge Group"
5. With the merged mask layer selected, go to "Adjust", "Blur", "Gaussian Blur". You will need to play with the amount of blur to get the effect you want. It varies based upon the size and pixel density of the photo you are dealing with as well as the strength of the effect you desire. For the six megapixel images from my Canon 300D I like to use a radius of 6. Enter the amount you want and hit OK.
6. If you stopped here, the image looks out of focus. That's really what the airbrush technique is all about, reducing the sharpness to smooth out detail in a photo. But, lack of sharpness is disturbing to the viewer. The trick is, only certain important areas need to be sharp, to give an impression of good sharpness overall.
   When it comes to photos of people, we look at faces. In particular, we zero in on eyes and the mouth. Sometimes our attention may be drawn to other spectacular accessories, such as jewelry. We need to keep these elements sharp, while retaining the pleasant smoothing blur in all other regions.
   To accomplish this, make sure you are still on the blurred layer and select the Eraser Tool. Choose a round shape, a size appropriate to the areas you are working with and a hardness of about 30. Zoom in to help you maintain high precision. Carefully erase the blur in the areas of the eyes and lips.
7. Now return to the layers menu. For the layer with the blurred image, select the Opacity slider and move it down to around 65%. This will reduce the impact of the blurring until you end with just the impression of smoothness.
8. Inspect the photo. Determine if there are other elements of the picture where blurriness is detracting from the composition. In those areas use the Eraser Tool again to wipe out the blur effect.

This article adapted from information posted to rec.photo.digital by Tom Nelson. See the original article here

Lights

The light fixtures that we had purchased were installed next. Here is the guest bedroom

and the bathroom

You can see that the toilet has been set and the bathroom counter installed as well. The rest of the basement lights were standard can lights.

Painting

Before laying the floor, we needed to get paint on the walls. The library was made a dark green color

while the media room went with a lighter green

Note that the funky orange color above the fireplace is not a paint color, but rather the glow of a tungsten worklight in the library. The bathroom also had a second coat put on its walls

The guest room color is peach, but there's no picture because it was getting late and I was tired of the camera.