November 16, 2009 – Palmer's World

At 3:16, Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, November 15, 2009, an event of epic proportions occurred.

My front step finally got some laminate attached to it.
This has been a long time coming…the laminate flooring was laid down in June and an acquaintance of mine mentioned how his step took him eight hours to do. Mentally, I was not prepared for such a project. To look at something as simple as a step and imagine it taking you eight hours to complete…how does one prepare thyself? With a lot of procrastination!

Finally, with an entire weekend to myself, I decided enough was enough, I am tired of hearing Vero’s comments about how the front step isn’t done and I must do something about it! Ha ha.
The problem has been acquiring the stair nosing for the laminate. First try involved going to Home Depot where they didn’t carry the nosing and I had to request it from the supplier themselves…but all they had was a fax number. No luck there. Then we finally went back last week to ask for some different nosing and the woman working there informed me that in the past 2-3 weeks, the wooden stair nosing has been disappearing and they don’t really know why. They assume some form of Consumer Report has been released saying that it’s dangerous to have the wooden nosing on stairs as you may easily slip down the stairs. This does not make a whole lot of sense to me considering years ago when stairs were wooden, there were not tracks to prevent slipping on them. Nonetheless, I realized that we would need to either put down some vinyl nosing or some aluminum ones. Vero and I chose some brushed aluminum ones. I must admit that I find that the aluminum nosings are ugly compared to what could have been with the wooden ones.

Saturday morning I awoke and got the tools in order and started cutting strips of laminate to go on the stairs. The morning was going great until I hit upon Mistake #1 which involved angles. My step has a 45 degree angle in it. Knowing what I know of cutting angles with the mitre saw, I automatically set my cut for 45 degrees and voila, I had two pieces that put together resulted in a glorious 90 degrees!

Wait a minute, that’s not right! Turns out that I had forgotten some basic geometry and that if I have a 45 degree bend in my step, then I need to divide that in half to make my cut on the laminate…22.5 on each of them. This was not a big loss and I wasn’t upset at my ineptitude as I realized that carpentry is an art that you must practice. Some phone calls to Dad (alright, MANY phone calls to Dad over the weekend) reassured me that I was perfectly capable of figuring out how to get these steps done.

After that hiccup, I cut out the plank which would become the top of the step with little problems. I was on a roll!

However, the gauntlet approached me quickly and I had no idea how hard it would be. I will attach pictures at a later date to show you some specifics of what I’m about to talk about.

I cut the aluminum trim to run along the laminate and the edge of the step. No problem. I then cut another piece that would run along the angled edge of the step. The problem we encountered is that we couldn’t figure out how to cut the two pieces so they would align to each other on an angle. At first I thought I could just leave one edge straight and the other would be cut on a 45 degree angle to snap into place, but that didn’t work. I literally spent 1.5 hours looking at these two pieces wondering how it could be possible to make them align together. At one point I gave up and decided to finish the rest of my work and cut some laminate pieces to finish the rest of the job. An hour later I was back at my original problem. I threw in the flag and called Mom and Dad and sent along some photos to illustrate my point.

After some careful examination of the problem at hand, we arrived at a solution and I was excited. It sounded like it could work! For those arriving at this page due to some Google search for this term “angle cut aluminum nosing”, I present to you the method in how you can make the angle cut.

1. Lay down one piece. Lay down the other piece so that it intersects and overlaps with the other.
2. Mark where the two pieces meet and then cut the overlapping piece so that it cuts from the mark to the corner of the piece. Wow, I just realized that this is really hard to explain in text. I really need to add some pictures later.
3. Once the overlapping piece has been cut, return it to overlap the other piece, then draw a line (using the cut piece as a guide) and cut the piece which is on the bottom.
4. If all goes well, they will match up perfectly!

I will tell you that I used a hacksaw to perform my cuts and it is in a pain the ass. If you have a mitre saw, go to your local hardware store and purchase a blade for your saw which can cut through aluminum. It makes a better cut. Case in point, because I used the hacksaw, I was off the mark on the first attempt and I had to wait until morning to purchase some more aluminum nosing.

The next morning I picked up the necessary pieces and I tried it again. It took awhile to change my blade on my mitre saw but with a little help from Dad, we managed to figure out how to go about it (where the heck did my manual go?). The aluminum cutting blade is a great thing to use, but be warned that litte bits of aluminum fly everywhere and my garage is full of them now. Also, take your time making the cut. The nosing buckled at one point because I was cutting too fast.

Success was had early afternoon on Sunday as the pieces I cut matched! It wasn’t a perfect job, but it couldn’t have been any better than what it was. With all the pieces in hand, Vero and I glued the laminate to the floor (a method recommended by Home Depot which I still question…wouldn’t it simply be easier (and easier to those in the future trying to tear up the laminate?) to nail a few corners of the laminate to the floor? Either way, we took Home Depot’s advice and glued the pieces to the step and then attached the trim. I must admit that after a day and a half of working on this step, I was quite relieved to finally see it done.

Renovations are interesting in that you are always striving for perfection but sometimes your eye is the only one that will ever notice an imperfection. It’s like painting. If you take a close look at anyone’s house, you will notice imperfections (mainly where the wall meets the ceiling) but for the most part, no one really catches those mistakes (unless you are blatantly looking for them). So I wonder if I will always look at my step and notice the mistakes that were made, or if I will accept it for a decent job that it is? Either way, the step is done and all is good in the world.

We didn’t want to stop there so we laid down some transition pieces along the laminate flooring. The pieces into the bathroom and the basement were simple to put down. The ones transitioning the kitchen are another story and have not been completed. You have to have enough space to lay down a metal track that the wooden transition piece lays into. This means that I had to cut some laminate to make space for the track. The first cut went fine with Dad’s zip saw (a handheld saw which is amazing. Everyone should have one). I encountered some major problems on another section to the point that the bit broke and I can’t get the nut off to put another bit in. Ouch. That was not a good ending to the day. No matter…I will find another way to cut a notch out for the steel track and the kitchen will be pretty well complete!

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