Enjoying the Living Room

We have finally reached the point where we can once again enjoy our living room space. It was a lot of work but we pulled it off. First, I had to fill all the cracks in the wood (note to anyone attempting their floors themselves - do this step before the initial sanding!). It took six tubes and three 32 oz. tubs of wood putty to fill all the cracks.

 

The next step was to mop up the excess. And mop. And mop. And mop some more. It took a lot of mopping to get the floors relatively clean. I say relatively because there always seemed to be a bit of dusty residue after the floors dried.

After letting the wood putty cure for a few days, I had to get ready to literally paint the cracks with stain. I stole one of the kids' paintbrushes to do this step as the fattest one was the perfect size for those filled cracks.

 

Here is what a section looks like once it has been "painted" with the stain. Again, you can see that our old floors had a lot of cracks.

The final step was to buff the floor with a microfiber cloth to remove any excess stain and to see if I missed any spots. They were pretty easy to spot due to the major variance in color!

After a few days to allow the stain to cure and dry really well, I had to sand the floors with 1000 grit sandpaper...again. And put on two coats of polyurethane. This time we used a high gloss finish. My husband loves the final look because the floor looks "wet;" I hate it. You can see every dimple and roller mark. The semi-gloss finish left a nice, dull smooth finish that looked much better in my opinion. Alas, I am stuck with shiny imperfect floors. I am planning on doing some more research on applying the high gloss finish so that the other floors finish up more smoothly.

We also applied a second coat of stain to the board and batten wainscoting that we had installed. It is now a much darker, richer color that better matches the coloring of the floor. Those also got a coat of polyurethane to make them easy to clean. And the same was done for the two window frames.

Finally, we painted the two walls Champlain Blue. I was able to find an 8' x 10' area rug that had the blue of the walls, the beige of the couch, the dark brown of the recliner, and the yellow from my overstuffed chair. With some new curtain rods installed and natural, light blocking drapes, the rooms has been reassembled.

We are not finished yet as we still have to install the built-in bookcases and we also have to finish the ceiling and install crown molding; but at least the room is a usable space once again and we are enjoying it quite a lot. This is what it looks like today!

More Windows, Trim, Walls, and Pennies

We have continued to work diligently on various projects around the house as we are able. Sometimes I feel as though we are a bunch of snails crawling all over these projects! A lot of times the long hours spent on things is because we are figuring out what we are doing (after extensive research) and just have no idea how much to order of things. Take, for example, our wonderful living room wood floor renovation project. We saw a nice video about how to fill the cracks (yep, after we stained and put on the polyurethane, we learn about this - nice timing, right?) So, we ordered six tubes of wood filler thinking that would be enough to finish the living room floor. Not! As you can see from this picture, we filled approximately one-third of the entire floor.

All those really light colored lines are cracks that have been filled. The plan is that I buy a quart of that wood fill putty stuff and literally scrape it into every crook, crack, and cranny using a putty knife. Once it dries, you mop the excess stuff right up. (Note to self....do this step before you stain and seal next time!) I am now trying to find the right stuff in quarts or gallons. It is not as easy as you think. Additionally, the video we saw had this guy rubbing it on with his fingertip to ensure that each crack was completely and smoothly filled. He's nuts. By the second tube, I figured out how to use the putty knife. Way faster and much better for the said fingertip, especially when the cracks are as wide as some of ours unfortunately are.

Remember the wonderful bathroom penny floor project? This is the first picture I showed you with about $14.00 worth of pennies.

Here is another picture with an additional $25.00 worth of pennies, for a total approximately $39.00 and some change. I mean, we do find odd pennies here and there around the house and friends and family members have been donating some to the project as well. We just keep track of what we get from the bank.

As you can see, $25.00 in pennies can cover quite a bit of square footage. My family (read my children) were really pushing for us to put in some kind of design. We debated all sorts of things from the Green Bay Packers logo to a music symbol like the treble clef or just our initial. I opted for our initial. The kids thought it was funny because the "F" could stand for "fart." As you can see, our humor is still in tact, even with all this wonderful remodeling. This is what the floor looks like with about $64.00 worth of pennies.

And I have also been playing with my new miter saw and wood. We had a lot of weird things going on with our wood floors. Everything from pieces being cut out to install funny angled walls, to the original staircase being reconfigured (to our best guess) and repairing the floor with cheap sub-floor materials. We wanted to keep the wood floors as original as possible, but where to scavenge the wood? We opted for the side entryway. Some of the original flooring had rotted over the years and while most of the boards were in good shape, it was not the best place for a wood floor. We decided to pry up all that wood as part of our side hallway project (more on that in a bit).

This is our side hallway. As you can see, it is fairly long and narrow, with stairs that lead to the landing. Additional stairs (not visible) lead to the basement. This area gets a lot of traffic so working on it gets kind of chaotic. The other challenge is that our house has really no storage space, as in coat closets, on the main floor, unless you consider the built-ins in the formal dining room. I have some ideas on how to tackle that based on some other blogs I love to read and use for inspiration. But more on that another day.

Here is another view from the end of the hallway looking towards the door. As you can see, the landing is not all that big so we have decided to tile it. I found some beautiful coppery glass tiles that I plan on using. This will make it easier to clean up and protect the wood underneath. But first, we had to pry up all the original hardwood flooring.

My wonderful husband figured out the best way to get the boards out with the least amount of damage. We still had to remove a lot of nails, but since I was cutting each board to fit, we were able to eliminate anything too damaged or rotted. Then the fun really began. It was a lot like completing some strange jigsaw puzzle - but with a miter saw. I had to measure each gap and then find the right boards to fill them. Some of the pieces had to be cut in strange ways and I was not always very successful at getting the perfect fit. (Thank God for wood putty....see why I want to buy it by the gallon?)

For example, here is a section where someone in their infinite wisdom cut part of the wood floor out so that they could build a wall to block the hallway. As you can see, each piece was a bit, well, unique. And of course I had to do some repairs around the chimney to fix the gap left after we removed the plaster and exposed the cream city brick.

But I was able to somewhat successfully repair it so that it now looks like this. Not too bad, if I have may say so and pat myself on the back. (And of course you see that really wide crack....more putty needed).

There was also the area where the original staircase had been built and later reconfigured. This was a cheap board covered with black adhesive - the same black adhesive that we removed from the entirety of the kitchen and back entrance floor. You can see a bit of it on the edges around the repair. I am assuming that the sander will make short work of that little bit. I also forgot to take the before picture, but here is an after.

I am hoping that once the cracks are filled (yep, more wood putty) and the entire floor is sanded, stained, and sealed, it will look almost seamless. You will most likely be able to see that there was a repair, but hopefully it will add character and not be quite as obvious as it is at the moment.

And the rest of the work has begun on the side hallway. I admit, it is terribly difficult to stay motivated. And I am finding that my wrists hurt a lot after about an hour worth of work. So, I have been working in one hour increments with an hour off in between. This means it takes longer, but the space is really just too small for two people to work on it at the same time.

I have one of the walls almost completely sanded and the long baseboard piece stripped of paint and lightly sanded. Because it is such a small area, I have found that I have to clean up after every hour of work because the dust just has nowhere to go but down on the floor, making it very slippery. The trim here is also harder to clean up than the trim in the living room. For some reason, the original baseboard was first varnished. Then at a later date it was painted to look like wood. Whoever did the painting did a good job because that paint will not scrape off - it has to be heated and then scraped. Finally, the painted wood look was painted yet again with white paint. Whoever did the white paint was clueless though, because that paint chips and peels right off.

I am still in the process of heating and scraping the paint off of the window. The outer part has been done, but now I am working with three different pieces of wood, some of which is curved, on the inside. Talk about tedious! The living room has provided plenty of practice so I just take it a little bit at a time. I already know that it will take me about six hours total just to finish the window. By then, the rest of the room should be ready to reassemble.

Redoing Your Floors Is NOT A Weekend Project

We discovered the hard, slow, and painful way that redoing your hardwood floors is NOT a weekend project. It is not a week-long project either. It is more like a two week one. Our floor quite literally has our blood, sweat, and hair in it. Who would have thought something that looks "so easy" would be so time consuming. Still, I would rather do the work myself than pay someone else $7,000 to do it for us. Here is our floor journey. First, this is where we started:

Day 1
Realize that you cannot possibly hand sand the entire floor using a Porter + Cable orbital sander. Not only will you have to change the sheets of sandpaper, but you have to sand the same spot several times. Give up! Rent a sander!

We found a round buffer sander for $21 for 4 hours or $31 for an entire day. Sounded cheap enough. We then had to pay for a red pad ($9.99) and four sheets of two grades of sandpaper: 36 grit ($9.99/sheet) and 60 grit ($8.99/sheet). Regardless, it was money well spent. We started sanding with the rented sander at around 1:30 in the afternoon; the floor was finally sanded to our standards by 10:00 pm. First, we went around the whole floor using the 36 grit sandpaper. This did a good job removing the old varnish, but left some weird black streaks on the floor.

Second, we went over the entire floor again, but this time we used the 60 grit sandpaper. It did a really good job smoothing out the floor, removing the last bits of varnish and most of the black streaks. We had to do some touching up with hand sander around the edges and in some spots where the big sander seems to have trouble. All in all, we thought that the floor looked pretty good - especially once we were all done vacuuming it and called it quits for the day.

Not too shabby, if I say so myself! I'll be honest, I was really tempted to leave the floors the natural color. It just looked so clean and nice. The dear hubby still wanted to stain the floors in keeping with our restoration goals. We have decided that we might leave the bedroom floors upstairs the lighter color, but are not sure yet. Why are we having so much trouble making up our minds? Well, we really love our stain color!

Day 2
Even though we thoroughly vacuumed the floor, and wiped it down with microfiber cloths, we learned a very important lesson here. You must use some sort of denatured alcohol or some other liquid to remove all those minute little particles that you cannot see with the naked eye. If you skip this step (as we, unfortunately did) all those little tiny minuscule mites of dust will magically appear as soon as you put on your first coat of polyurethane. Anyway, after wiping down and cleaning the floor really well (or so we thought), I added the stain with a paintbrush. We had tested the stain in a small corner the night before, but there was nothing to wipe off, so we decided to use a paintbrush and spread the stain very thinly with minimal overlap. We wanted good coverage and we had already discovered that our boards were thirsty.

Isn't that just a beautiful color? It looked so nice and we were thrilled with our decision. So we just let the floor stay and waited for the stain to dry.

Day 3
And waited for the stain the dry.

Day 4
And waited for the stain to dry.

Day 5
At this point, I admit, we were getting a little nervous and were wondering if the stain was ever going to dry. I mean, we expected a few delays since the temperature skyrocketed to 75 degrees and we had rain. The subsequent stifling humidity meant it would take longer. But four days! Come on! So we did a little bit more research and discovered that really dark stains (like ours) can take twice as long to dry! What?! So, we waited patiently some more.

Day 6
Yeah! The stain is finally dry, or so we debated. My wonderful husband wanted to wait another day just to be sure. I did not. The weather was perfect - not too hot or humid - for putting on the polyurethane. I won the day and put on the first coat.

It looked a little weird when we put it on. I mean, the surface was all ripply from the lambskin paint roller. I confess, I was very nervous and wondering if my husband was right. I had put on the polyurethane just before bedtime and by morning, this was the glorious sight.

Day 7
I was in love and doing the happy dance. I did not even notice the funny little bits in the polyurethane. I simply rolled on the second coat and thought we were done. Finished. Ready for the next project.

I just had to let the floor dry for 24 hours or more to cure the final coat. Apparently, my husband was not as satisfied as I was and had some issues with the little bumps caused by the missed grit. Sigh.

Day 8
Do absolutely nothing to the floor but admire it (me) and debate the merits of what we should do next to fix the grits (my husband). We did some more reading and research. A lot of it. We found some really great sites with lots of advice - the main one being do not do this at home yourself and why staining is a bad idea. We test a few things we had around the house, including a brown paper bag, scotch rite cleaning pads, and 100 grit sandpaper. The results were, well, scary. We finally discovered a site written by a woman that had done a lot of floors. She recommended that we sand the polyurethane floor very well with 1000 grit sandpaper.

Did you know that they even made this kind of sandpaper? I didn't. Learn something new every day.

Anyway, she recommended that you sand the polyurethane really well, clean it very thoroughly and then put on the next coat of polyurethane. So we planned a trip to Home Depot.

Day 9
I had a nice long list of things that I wanted from Home Depot anyway, so we made the trip worth our while. We purchased all the woodwork we needed to install the baseboard, board and batten, and chair rails. We also purchased another gallon of our floor polyurethane. I even found a sanding attachment for my extension pole so I would not have to sand the floor on my hands and knees. And my wonderful hubby bought me a nail gun. Oh the projects I will build! I was happy (even though I was coming home to work on the never-ending floor).

After we came home and unloaded everything, I rigged up my little sandpaper holder to the extender pole and discovered that the sand paper strips were about two inches too short. Really! Come on! I did not give up. I taped that stupid paper down good and went to work sanding the entire floor. Over and over and over again until it and I were covered with dust. Then it was time to get on my hands and knees and wipe down the entire floor with a damp cloth. In a stroke of brilliance (if I say so myself), I rigged a microfiber cloth to the sandpaper holder and polished that floor as well as I possibly could. No little grit mites were going to ruin my floor. I finally put on the third coat of polyurethane. And went to bed. I was too tired to even take a picture.

Day 10
We checked the floor again as soon as we woke up. This was becoming monotonously routine. But actually, we were pretty pleased. The sanding tip worked and removed about 75% percent of the imperfections we had seen in the previous coats of polyurethane. The larger ones were knocked down a bit but still visible. At this point, we exhaustedly agreed  to do one final coat of polyurethane. Most people stop at three coats but because this is our home and we only want to do the floors once in our lifetime (should I mention that we have seven more floors to go) we decided to do four coats. The floor had washed up very nicely with just the two coats, but we are pretty rough on our floors. They get mopped a lot. And we have dogs that have puppies. That floor needs a lot of protection. So four coats. Yep. We agreed and it was done.

Day 11
The floor is finally dry. We are just letting it cure very well before we protect it with brown paper while we work on our other projects. I must say, we are happy with the final result. And, on to the next project.