Our New Old House

A few weeks ago, Brandon had to go to Texas for job training. I decided to surprise him by getting a major project done, or at least a big chunk of one. My target: sand the front bedroom floor and prep it for staining and varnishing.

Here’s how the floor looked when I got started:

Pretty bad.

But I was feeling ambitious, and I had a plan. I also had help from a community program. The Tool Lending Library is available for single family home owners in Des Moines who meet certain income criteria. You pay a yearly fee to be a member and you can borrow tools for a deposit. Bring back the tool in good working order and you get your deposit back.

I borrowed this beast from the tool library:

That’s a random orbital sander with three 8-inch sanding pads. Serious business. Oh yes.

I picked up the sander on Friday, bought some sanding pads for it, and started sanding that night. Menards rents out the same kind of sander so I went there to buy the pads. I bought several packs of each grit: 30, 50, and 80, 30 being the coarsest and 80 being the finest. They didn’t have anything finer than 80 grit for the big pads, but I did get some 120 grit pads for my 5 inch random orbital sander.

If you’ve never used one of these rental sanders before, as I had not, here are a couple of tips:

It comes apart in two pieces for easier moving and storage. A bolt unscrews at the base of the handle and the vacuum cord detaches, as does the power cord. The round base is VERY heavy, so make sure you have help moving it in and out of the car. That was by far the hardest part of the whole experience, moving that base into the car and then from the car into the house. The rest of the process was awesomely easy!

The vacuum bag is easy to remove and empty. Don’t leave wood dust in there overnight. It can be a fire hazard.

To put the pads on, tip the handle back so it’s resting on the floor. That raises the base so you can change the pads. The pads have hook & eye (aka Velcro) backing and you just slap them on the bottom and you’re good to go!

After asking some people about how to proceed, I decided to just start sanding once I’d done a quick surface cleaning of the floor. Some people would recommend using a chemical stripper to take the top layer of varnish off. That’s a valid point and would have probably saved me a little hassle about the sanding pads getting clogged, but overall, I think I saved myself time and effort by just jumping straight to the sanding. The floor was gouged and damaged such that I knew I’d be taking off a pretty deep layer anyway, so doing an extra round with the coarse grit sandpaper to take off the old finish was expected.

I’m not sure what kind of finish was on the floor. But when I started sanding, the pads got gummed up with a waxy substance. If you’re reading this and you know floor finishes, can you tell me if that was floor wax or if it was just varnish that got hot and melted?

I pulled the pads off and let them cool a minute and the stuff chipped right off, so I did that a few times until I’d gotten pretty much all of the finish off the top layer.

When I’d finished that first pass it looked like this:

But the big sander didn’t get the edges.

So I used the orbital sander to do the edges.

Here’s a closeup of the edge.

And now that I’ve brought you to the edge… I’ll leave you to check in again next time!

I’ve been making slow but steady progress with stripping the paint off the woodwork in the front bedroom. Here are some pictures.

Before:

During:

After:

Before:

During:

After:

Scratch is impressed.

My arms were really sore from my yoga class this week so I didn’t so a lot of “up high” work in the front bedroom, though I did heat gun off some more paint from the window frames.  They’re pretty much ready for a coat of Citri-Strip to take off the varnish that’s left.  I cleaned up the room a bit, swept out the window sills, swept the floor, organized my tools, and prepared for the next day’s work.  Every little bit helps, I keep telling myself.

[tags]woodwork, bedroom, windows[/tags]

I forgot to upload these photos yesterday. Here are some more pictures of my windows in the front bedroom as I’m removing them.

One thing I learned is that because I need to break the stops between the sashes to get them out, I need to access them from the side. Luckily, there are access holes to get to the weights and these allow me to access the sides of the stops too.

Here are the weights. Notice the unusual knot used to tie them on. Someone told me this knot was commonly used for window weights. I’ve seen it in two different houses so far.

Here are the window frames after I removed the sashes. It was very weird having gaping holes in the side of my house, so I took a lot of pictures of how that looked before I put the storm windows back on.

And I took a few at night so you could see the room itself and not just the light from outside.

So here’s my nice stack of windows ready to be refurbished.

Mark that task off my list!

[tags]bedroom, windows, photos, woodwork[/tags]

Spring is here, people! That means I get to work on my windows!

My goal for the windows is to take them apart, reglaze them, refinish the wood, and put them back together better than ever.

Here I am with my first window to dismantle.

I took off the front stop and then the lower sash came right out.

The stop between the two sashes was a lot harder to get out. It’s not just nailed onto the frame. It is inserted into the frame about half an inch. I’m going to have to break the stop and then insert a new one when I put it back together.

Once I got that stop out I was able to lower the top sash to take it out too. The top sashes were all terribly painted shut and I spent a good 20 minutes tapping a putty knife into the cracks around the edges to loosen the paint.

Here are the ropes for the weights. Someone must have replaced these sometime in the recent past because they’re in great condition.

Now with the sashes out, there was a giant hole in my house!

Here are the windows waiting to be restored. I need to finish stripping the paint off the frames before I start working on these.

I made sure to label each one so I know where to put them back when they’re done.

I took more pictures but I guess they haven’t ended up on my Flickr account yet. All the windows are out of the front bedroom now, though, and I’m working on stripping the last of the paint off the window frames.

[tags]bedroom, windows, paint, woodwork, photos[/tags]