The World of Sanding

Here's another peek into the work we've been doing... I'm a little reluctant to show them, since it'll take some of the pizazz away from the final reveal, but you'll get to see a little bit more of what we've been doing these past few days...


DOWNSTAIRS
We started refinishing the floors downstairs, in the living and dining rooms (the kitchen currently has linoleum). Here's what the floors liked like once the carpet came up:


These floors looked the best of any others in the house. You can see there are spots of random paint and primer, but nothing like some of our upstairs rooms. We're also not quite sure what the two big squares in the middle of each of the rooms were - perhaps they originally had a rug there, and didn't bother to finish under it? The floors are actually raised in those areas, too. We tried to even it out some, but we're not professionals and evening out the whole thing would have taken much longer than the full day we spent working on it.

These couple of shots show Josh using the sanding drum machine... it is actually pretty fascinating to watch it work. It takes effort, but after a few passes you get to see the grime fade away, and new wood come up, ready to be finished...

And, ta da! The post-sanding, pre-polyurethane floors! Downstairs, at any rate.

UPSTAIRS
Here's the room we spent WAY too much time working on upstairs. The room where someone at some point over the past 84 years decided that PAINTING OVER HARDWOOD FLOORS WOULD BE A GOOD THING. Agh! And not only that, but painting over it three times. It may be hard to tell, but if you look carefully, the section in the middle is painted brown, the main outside section is painted red/brown on top of that, and then there's a ring of grey in the middle. Don't ask, because I don't know what possessed them to do that.

Oh, and the picture above is actually a picture from AFTER all this paint seen below was stripped off:

Josh managed to capture a picture of me working the sanding machine... it took HOURS to get through all that point. It was pretty awful... and discouraging! It's hard when one room - and only the first of three levels of sanding - takes you SIX HOURS. But hey! I've got my protective respiratory mask on, so all is well!

Below you can see the evil, evil sanding machine in the closet. That thing is a beast! It weighs SO MUCH, and it's only a foot tall, so you have to hunch over the floor, holding it up, trying to control it. IT'S BAD NEWS. As you can see from Josh's reaction.

But look! NON-PAINTED OVER FLOORS!!!! Also, notice that in the "Before" shot, there was lovely light streaming in the windows... and now, in the picture below, it's absolutely pitch black.

STILL TO GO...
We still have a few upstairs rooms to go - hopefully Josh and Jose will get them mostly done today, and I can finish them up tonight! Below is the bedroom where, instead of painting over hardwood floors, they just TILED OVER THEM. I'm not even kidding. This whole room had square, alternating brown-colored tiles. All that black stuff? Yeah, that's the tar residue left over that we couldn't get up. We've been scraping at it for a few days now, but this is our guest bedroom, and our lowest priority. As you can see, we'll be painting its walls when we get back in January. But, I'm sure getting through this tar is going to be just as much fun as getting through that paint...

Here's a shot of the hallway, with its uneven planks. This is the "worst" section of the wood, in regards to non-cosmetic condition (such as paint and tar). At some point they obviously replaced a few planks, but just didn't finish them. The bad news is that it'll take a few times going over it to get it even. The good news is that they'll all be the same color in the end.

And lastly, this room should be pretty easy (comparatively) to sand and refinish. It has a few stains, but nothing too atrocious. And it's a sneak peek of the orange!

So, there's your day's lunchtime sneak peek... hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to report that the sanding's done! And if you want to help, feel free to come on over at any time...