We’ve had unfinished projects before, but when I think of the one that caused me the most pain over the past 21 months, its the transition from our kitchen to dining room. When we moved in, there was a metal transition, the kind you’d expect in a garage or shed.
When we replaced the linoleum flooring in the kitchen with laminate, we attempted to install the transition that came with the laminate flooring. This worked somewhat well as it went from laminate in the kitchen to the carpet that was in the rest of the house. Still, it wasn’t perfect, as there was nothing to secure it to below the carpet. We had to use glue. Glue that I ended up having to scrape up by hand after that piece of wood was removed.
When we ripped up the carpet and had the hardwood refinished, we discovered the problem went deeper than we thought. The reason the transition had nothing to hold onto was that the old exit from the kitchen to outdoors had never been replaced with regular flooring when the expanded kitchen was built.
Let me back track a bit if that last part was confusing. At some point in the 60’s or 70’s the original kitchen became a dining room and an expansion was built and made into a kitchen. When this happened the old step to the outside became a transition into the kitchen with a roughly one inch gap left open.
We tried to reuse the transition we installed when the carpet was there, but that wasn’t the right size. We bought a new transition that matched the laminate, and again we glued it in place. However, after numerous bumps and trips, it didn’t hold and we ripped it up. There’s been a gap there for the past few months.
This time we bought a solid wood transition, and stained it to match the hardwood. Our hardwood is pretty dark, so it took a few coats of stain.
Before putting a coat of poly on it, I screwed it into the floor with two very long wood screws. I filled this with wood filler, and stained it to match. In retrospect I probably should’ve installed it and then stained it, but I didn’t want to have to leave it there while the stain dried.
A long running and frustrating project had a rather simple solution, we just needed to use the right supplies this time.
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