Wow, October is gone and its been 20 some days since I last updated the blog. A lot of work has been put in during this time, but progress has been slow. Essentially every aspect of the floor project has taken at least 4 times longer than expected. Clearly we (I) need to adjust my expectations! That said, the results so far have been good.
The two bedroom floors we are working on were at one time carpeted. The previous inhabitants used tack strips along the walls and glue on the floor. This presents an immediate challenge because before the floor can be sanded, foreign substances must be removed as much as possible. While the temptation to sand it right off is great, patience pays off in the long run as sanding would simply heat up the glue and spread it around. So the best way to do this is by scraping.
I'm actually a big fan of scraping as a means of surfacing wood. A well-sharpened cabinet scraper can produce a smoother finish than 180-220 grit sandpaper. This is because the scraper is actually cutting very fine shavings off the surface rather than making millions of tiny little abrasions with an abrasive. A really sharp plane produces the smoothest finish of all.
Of course my purpose was removal of foreign material and initial repair of any bad scratches or incongruities in the floor. I'm also getting at the corners and edges this way. I'm not aiming to produce a hand-scraped floor that for some reason seems to be popular nowadays. We've already been provided with an "antique, distressed look." And, of course, I'm not using a cabinet scraper, though its one of the handiest, simplest tools around, and I do in fact, keep one sharpened and on hand. No, I am getting most of the work done with a standard pull scraper, what most people would identify with scraping painted surfaces. When kept sharp, this thing can remove wood and associated surface material fast! You can see that shavings pile up quickly. The downside it that these blades dull quickly so a mill file must always within reach and I sharpen the blade very, very often. So, a scraper, a mill file, and a pair of knee pads are the essential tools for this phase:
You can see the carpet glue that appears like a grey stripe under the left knee pad there.
Our focus last week was prepping the spare bedroom, the hallway, and the kitchen for sanding. Then the plan was to sand those rooms, and oil finish them. Well, only the spare bedroom and hallway are completely finished. The kitchen is around 80% sanded and will be finished at the same time as the master bedroom and the family room (we are calling it the back room); approximately this coming weekend (ever the optimist).
Here's the spare bedroom in the middle of prep-work. There was a lot of glue down on this floor and scraping/prepping ran around 8 hours.
Here's that same corner, after scraping and detail sanding:
And finally then to the sanding:
We used an orbital sander (less aggressive) as we weren't interested in re-surfacing the floor. We kind of like the distressed look that it came with. We were mostly just interested in prepping the surface for re-finishing. The primary goal here is to simply remove the old finish and smooth it out (removing orbital sander marks). I won't go into detail, but this was incredibly time consuming and we used a TON of sandpaper. The results were good though. Here's the bedroom again, freshly sanded:
And here's the hallway:
And here's the kitchen, part way through sanding with the sander there in the middle:
I'll write more about the finish we used soon, but here are some preliminary results:
In the meantime, we have also been prepping and priming walls for paint:
Daisy finds all this work to be very boring:
Stay tuned for more!!
