Floor Adventure Round 2

When we last left the floors we had gotten most of the sanding done, but there was still some problematic areas over by the picture window. We've been working on sanding more and more and more and more. We finally came to the conclusion, that well, that area but the picture window really isn't going to get much better. Whether it is indeed damage by the sun, crappier wood, or just not great sanding by us (but we tried and tired and tried) that's just how it's just going to have to be

So we moved on and started tackling more things we had to get done before we were even close to stain ready.

Like all of the little crevices and corners we couldn't get the finish sander or our palm sander into

And the stairs

And now those stairs look mighty pretty



We also had to replace a piece of wood in front of the fireplace. The old one had split so we carefully removed it a little while ago. We measured for fit and then found that our new wood would be installed a bit proud of the old wood. The subfloor is a little wonky here so I think it's a combination of it being a high spot and also our new wood being slightly thicker

Good thing we have a planer! :) It made things a lot easier. If we didn't have one we would have had to take the belt sander to it over and over and over again, but with the planer we were able to slide it through little by little to take a completely uniform amount off and get it just about perfectly level with the old floor. Once we got that right, we slid it into place and hammered it in with finish nails (we could have used the nail gun, but we wanted round holes like the rest of the floor)

Then we went around the whole room looking for bare metal showing from old nail heads. We used a counter sink to nail them down below the top surface of the wood so our wood filler would cover it up and once all the floor was finished you wouldn't be able to see any sparkle of visible nail heads (I forgot to take a picture).

Then came time to screen it which involves using a screen-like sandpaper...

...and attaching it to a pole and running it over all of your floors. This fine gritted screen helps smooth the transitions between the different sanding methods used on your floors (between the field area and the corners and borders)

Then finally we were ready for the wood filler, hooray! (after vacuuming of course). We opted to use Woodwise Full-Trowel Filler on the floors. Instead of patching holes here and there you pour out a workable amount of the wood filler onto your floors and then use a grout float to spread it out all over. This fills all your nail holes, gaps between wood, gouges in the wood, you name it. It helps give a nice, clean, even surface across the entire floor. We hopped to it



It took the two of us maybe 45 minutes to get it all done, which is actually probably faster (and a lot less annoying) than it would have been to hunt around for every nail hole and putty it over. Once we got to the edge of the room and our butts started colliding I jumped out and Chris finished it up

We were hoping to be able to sand that same day so we brought in a fan to try to dry things out quicker

But things were still taking a bit longer to fully dry everywhere and while we were pretty sure it wouldn't take too long to get it all sanded, we didn't want to push our luck and have it take hours longer and be sanding at 10pm (no fun), so we resolved that we'd sand it this weekend. It's looking oh so inviting now though!

OMG the Weeds

It's been just about 6 months since we laid all the weed block fabric, put rocks on top of it and basked in our pergola is done glory

We "splurged" (it was just the slightly more expensive weed block at HD, but by no means costly) for Easy Gardener Commercial Weed Barrier which claims to keep the weeds down for 30 years. Ummm, try less than 3 months




Yup, WEEDS FUCKING EVERYWHERE. Chris and I were totally pissed. It wasn't like we'd forked over any real substantial amount of money (just over $25), but it was really annoying to have bought something that only lasted 1/120'nd its advertised life span.

So we called them and said that we wanted a refund because they're product didn't actually work. They sent me an email on November 17th with an attached form I needed to fill out for them to process. It asked questions like "Describe the area you used the product" and "How did you prepare the area?" and "How soon after preparing the area did you place the fabric?" I was totally annoyed. I wanted to write: YOUR PRODUCT SUCKS: WE TAMPED DOWN DIRT, SPRAYED THE SHIT OUT OF IT WITH ROUND-UP, LAID DOWN THE FABRIC AND PUT 2 INCHES OF ROCKS DOWN AND WITHIN 3 MONTHS THERE WERE WEEDS ALL OVER. I kept it together and filled out the form and emailed it to Chris before I sent it to make sure I wasn't too mean (and I included a picture of when we laid it down and of the weeds now). And we waited. I've had the idea to write this post since then but it wasn't until YESTERDAY that we finally heard back from them, and I wanted to hear a response before I wrote about it. Well, the response is it took them 10 weeks to give us a refund of $26

I'm appreciative that we got the refund even though the amount of effort it took probably wasn't worth $26, but out of principal it was just really disappointing that the product SUCKED SO BAD. So, word to the wise: don't use Easy Gardener Commercial Weed Barrier. And maybe now I need to write to Round-Up too...

Sanded Floors Here we Come

The time has finally come: we're starting to refinish the front room floors. Hooray! Despite that excitement, sanding them down has not been fun, I'm just excited that we're mostly done with the sanding because it is very not fun.

First up, clearing the room. We had accumulated a lot of crap in here (ladders, paint containers, etc.) so all that had to go out. Once we were left with just our weight machine Chris and I delicately slid it over to the office entrance and lifted, wiggled, shimmied and grunted it into the office

It came with a slight casualty

But that's nothing a little paint can't cure.

Next up was prepping the room. We set up the zip walls (and you can still see the turquoise paint at the bottom of the right one from our raccoon sacrifice)

We taped up the bookcases

And the light

And then we were ready to start (don't worry, we closed that door to the office)


At first we tried to be lazy and used 60 grit sandpaper on our palm sander to see if we could get away without having to rent a sander (we only had a layer of poly to sand off, not poly and stain)

But it didn't work super great so we quickly relented as we knew it was only $36 to rent it for 4 hours, so it wasn't a huge sacrifice or anything.

We had to decide, however, if we were going to use a drum sander or a finish sander. A drum sander sort of works like a giant belt sander and is a lot more powerful while a finish sander is essentially 4 orbital palm sanders working at a lower RPM, so it's a lot more delicate. Our floors are 5/16 face nailed, so we didn't have too much wiggle room in terms of accidentally sanding off a ton or accidentally chewing up the floors with the more powerful drum sander. Because we only needed to remove a light top layer of poly we didn't want to be too aggressive and accidentally hurt our floors and need to replace a bunch of boards. So we opted for the more delicate finish sander.

After spending 40 minutes at HD waiting to be helped and have our order processed by our least favorite know-it-all-but-really-doesn't-know-anything tool rental employee we returned home with the sander and got to work. Unfortunately for about the first hour I didn't help Chris much as something popped up with work that I had to deal with, but he mosey'd around that floor

He used 80 to start (in hindsight we should have used 60, but again, we were afraid of chewing up the floor)

Pretty quickly we threw it out the window that we'd only have the sander for 4 hours because we realized this process was going to take a lot longer than we thought. The poly that they used in the 20s is apparently amazing and so it was taking a lot to get it off

But we kept at it and Chris went over it and over it and over it with the finish sander and I came in with the palm sander (at 60 grit because I could be more methodical and delicate with the palm sander) and tried to get all the little grooves and other areas the finish sander couldn't quite get everything off of

Slowly but surely it started to look better

But again, not all the poly was off so around and around and around the finish sander went

(and I kept following around and around and around with the palm sander)

After about 5 hours things were looking good enough to break out the 100 grit. About 95% of the poly was off (it's still not perfect over by the picture window), but I hopped on the finish sander with 100 and went over everything again

And here's an idea of just how much sawdust was in the air during this process

Around 5:30 after being exhausted and frustrated (it was taking a long time) we resolved to call it a day. The floors weren't completely sanded and we'll probably give it another go at the area by the picture window with 60 grit and the palm sander to try to get the last poly off, but I think the floors look a lot better (and by better we of course mean completely sanded and bare, minus all the stains. Boo.)

But we were really tired. The finish sander is pretty powerful and heavy so it takes a decent amount of muscle to move it around the room. And my arms were in a perpetual state of vibration from the palm sander and my calf and thigh muscles were twitching from being crouched down for many continuous hours, so I think Chris and I deserved a break.

The area around the bookcases looks pretty bare and doesn't really need any more work

But the area by the picture window isn't looking as good (discoloration and a bit more worn)

We weren't quite sure if the sun had some effect on the wood, if there was more foot traffic over here or maybe we just didn't do as good of a job, but it's definitely something to tackle on Meryl + Chris vs. Sanding the Floors Day 2.

Ohhhhh. Ahhhhhh.

Alternative title for this post: Meryl Should have Taken Better Notes.

You remember this light we bought a long long time ago?

That I worked on refinishing by spray painting it oil rubbed bronze about 2 months ago?

Well, it is FINALLY up in the front room, yay!!!! But it didn't come without a headache. I thought my brain took detailed notes when I took the light apart, but, I was wrong. One wouldn't necessarily think putting a light together that you had taken apart that didn't have too many parts would be that difficult. But an hour through the light still looked like this

Now, that sort of looks correct, but that stupid pipe thing coming out the top was still too long and so the chain part that attached to the top didn't screw down far enough for all the parts to not move around and wiggle a lot. I was starting to get really pissed off so Chris came in to help. We finally go the light put together semi-correctly (we couldn't figure out what to do with 2 parts, but the light seemed to look fine and was strong enough, so...) But when we tested out hanging it from the ceiling neither of us thought it hung low enough. So we had to take it apart again so Chris could rewire it with longer electrical (or you could splice two wires together, but that would look not so hot)

And then? IT WAS TIME TO HANG IT! As you can tell, I was very excited for this step :) It came with some headaches also (attaching the old escutcheon to the new light and the pitched ceiling was a tad difficult), but we got it up and it looks glorious!

Chris and I love love love it. The light actually went up about 3 weeks ago (seriously, no lie), but one of the bulbs didn't work straight out of the packaging (LAME) and so I didn't want to post pictures of it until we had gone back to HD to get more bulbs so it was lit in all its gloriousness :) But we kept forgetting the bulbs, and then I kept forgetting to actually screw them in, and then I kept forgetting to take pictures of it... BUT, now it's all working and it's amazing!

I'm really really happy that Chris likes it a lot too because he wasn't too keen on the idea of replacing the old one and getting a new one. I totally understood his reasoning, but the old light I didn't think fit the room as well (plus, we'll reuse it in the nook later when we refinish that room because an ugly ceiling fan is in there now). Chris gave me props for the light choice and I gave him props for waiting it out to see how it turned out and we gave props to the awesome light for lighting the room so well

As you can tell, we like it a lot :)

And now this room is really well lit, and that's a super great development because the old lighting wasn't very good. 4 new recessed cans (well, 5 if you count the $25 baby can in the relief area), 2 sconces and the center light all make for great lighting and a great front room :)

Now it's just time to finally get to those damn floors.

Our Sandpaper is Organized, Super Nerdy?

I am a total big fat nerd because I like to file things. That's right, I ENJOY filing. Getting things alphabetized, color coded, binder tabs, labels, EEE!!! It just whips my heart into a frenzy. When we were shopping around on Black Friday this past November we hit up Sears because they always have awesome deals. They did in fact have one cool one that Chris and I caved for: A filing sleeve of sandpaper for under $10, and it came with TONS of sandpaper. Score!

And yes, you heard right that we purchased it 2 months ago. And you know what? It's been sitting on the work bench in the garage for all that time. Finally, on Sunday between chair coats while we were cleaning up and putting things away in the garage I decided it might be time to finally organize the sandpaper file.

I grabbed all our sandpaper sheets from the sandpaper drawer

The file had labels for 40 grit, 60, 100, 150 and 220

We had additional paper at 80 grit, 320 and 400

So I relabeled a couple sections (I made 40-60, 80, 100, 150, 200 and >220), and then I shoved all the sandpaper inside

Am I a total nerd because this folder just makes me so excited?

Look at that sandpaper drawer!

I may have to get some folders for the palm sander paper because that file folder just makes me too excited to not go on a sandpaper filing frenzy :)