Saturday morning we finished making the repairs to the floor by replacing the damaged planks. I regret now that I didn't take any pictures of the process, as demo is always fun. It involved a series of plunge cuts with the circular saw into the damaged plank, removing a center section of the board, then prying out the outside tongue and groove sections. Shannon bought me a dremmel to help with the cutting. We also used a rip saw, and anything else to get those old 99 year old boards out of there! It was a tedious process, but turned out well in the long run.
After the repairs were done, we headed into town to buy our supplies. We rented an orbital sander to smooth out the imperfections. Shannon manned the big sander as Jackson and I used hand sanders around the hard-to-reach edges.
A little ways into the project we learned that the sander was more effective if we added some weight onto it. Needless to say, we had a lot of volunteers for this assignment.
This is the point where I stopped taking pictures. It got pretty dusty and messy, so I packed up the camera and put it away.
After sanding with three different grits of sandpaper, we cleaned and prepped the floor for staining. We got the first coat on Saturday night, and after all of the clean-up, finally got to bed about 2 A.M.
Sunday morning Shannon loaded up all of the kids and took them to church while I stayed home and put a second coat of stain on the floors. We took the family out for lunch, visited Papa Joe in his skilled nursing home, returned the sander to the rental store, and anything else we could think of the keep the kids out of the house!
Bryce, Colton, and Chase had gone to my sister's house with my parents for the weekend, so we only had the bigs and the littles at home. Alex, Jackson and Abbie spent a lot of time entertaining the littles so we could continue to work without adding footprints to the floor.
By late Sunday night we had two coats of stain and the stain sealer applied to the floor. Monday morning we got up and began applying the polyurethane. After seven coats, we called it quits.
We're very pleased with the results. The floors are by no means perfect, and we ended up with some weird stain phenomenon when we applied the sealer, but it is SO MUCH better than carpet.
We're thinking that they would look inconsistent with the rest of the house if they WERE perfect, so to us, imperfect is just perfect.
This is my favorite part of the whole project. We realize that it was optimistic to think that we could keep all of the children out of the hallway, living room, and dining room for three whole days. Sunday evening while the stain was still a little sticky, Hudson attempted to make the jump from the kitchen to the stairs leading up to his room.
He didn't quite make it, and left a sweet little footprint on the floor. I just couldn't bring myself to stain over it, so it will stay with our house until someone more ambitious than I, decides to do away with it.
We still need to stain and install the quarter-round trim in both rooms. It's been too humid to stain this week, so the trim is still waiting in the garage. It's not going anywhere.
This is one more project we can cross off the "to-do" list.
"Then you will walk safely in your way, and your foot will not stumble." Proverbs 3:23
3 comments:
I've been thinking about you guys lots over the past couple weeks! Glad your project is all done. Looks great! Before long that little boy is going to be a big boy, so I'm sure you will really appreciate the sweetness of the footprint in a few years:)
Those look beautiful!
When we did my parents we all took turns being the weight on the sander too! fun!
The footprint is precious. i'm glad you decided to leave it. I think the floors look great!! Yet another job that would not be attempted in our house!
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