Our New Old House

Now that I knew that the color was right, I was ready to start staining the freshly sanded floor. I used some pre-stain conditioner first.

It evened out the finish on the wood in preparation for receiving the stain.

I started doing sections, a few boards at a time so I could make sure the timing was even.

The color came out beautifully!

I was ready to give it a protective coating. I used Minwax Polyurethane for Floors in semi-gloss. Here it is with the first coat drying:

And here are some photos of it all done!

Overall, it was a good experience! This room was my test room to see if I could do the rest of the floors in the house myself. I feel pretty confident that I can do the rest, so check back again sometime in the future when I tackle the big project of the living room and dining room floors!

Last time I showed you how I sanded the front bedroom floor. A splendid time was had by all.

But while I was having all that fun with the great big power tool, I had a niggling question in the back of my head: How much of this gorgeous oak is there left and how deep can I sand?

I knew the floor had been refinished years ago and whoever had done it had taken off WAY too much wood. When I took the quarter round trim off the baseboard it exposed the original height of the floor and it had been sanded a good 3 millimeters down. I didn’t know how much wood was there to start with so I sanded with caution. I would have liked to go deeper and take out some of the deeper flaws, but I was so afraid I’d go right through the bottom of the oak that I erred on the side of having floors with an “antiqued” look.

After I had returned the sander to the Tool Lending Library, I was scrounging around in my basement for a rag or something and came across a chunk of wood that had been cut out of the floor of our front bedroom closet. We’d had a furnace vent installed and the installer had cut a round piece out of the floor and just left it in the basement. This meant I had a perfect cross-section of my floor!

As you can see, there was plenty of wood to work with, so when I do future rooms, I’ll be sure to sand more aggressively and really get that brand new finish. As it was, I didn’t kick myself too hard over the floor I’d just done. After all, a big bed would end up covering up most of the flaws anyway.

Now that I had a piece of the original floor, I could practice things! So I clamped the chunk of wood to my work bench and went all mad scientist on it.

This was really exciting for me because I was thinking about changing the color of the stain to refinish the floors. See, the last time they were redone was around 1964. At that time they painted all the woodwork white and restained the floor a honey gold color. It was certainly a nice color, but when I stripped the paint off the woodwork to reveal the red oak stain underneath, it clashed with the yellowish color of the floor. I wanted to pick another color that would compliment the red oak trim better, so I picked up a can of Minwax in Cherry.

I sanded half of the boards in my sample so I could compare the colors and also so I’d have a second chance if I tried this and changed my mind.

I got a small can of Minwax Cherry stain and tried it out on the sanded wood. The instructions said to leave it on 10-15 minutes. I experimented with different times to get the right depth of stain.

The first round of stain was too light at 10 minutes.

But after the second round, giving it a couple more minutes, it came out just the way I wanted.

Now that I had the stain I wanted, I took my sample upstairs to compare it with the woodwork.

Keep in mind that I haven’t varnished the woodwork yet, so the color on that will come out a little deeper red when that’s done. But I was very happy with the cherry color, so I decided to proceed! Check back again soon to see the whole floor stained!

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!

Here’s where we were on Tuesday night. Party’s on Saturday. Can we do it?

I think we can.

We’ve made some good progress on the dining room. Here’s how the dining room windows looked mid-chemical strip:

And with chemical stripping done, waiting for wood filler to dry so I can sand it.

The rest of the woodwork in the dining room is coming along nicely. I finished stripping one side of this door.

And the rest of the woodwork on the doorways:

Here’s the kitchen doorway mid-chemical strip:

Brandon took off the door so I could get the rest of this doorway stripped. It’s pretty much done now except for some minor clean up of putty between the pieces.

And the kitchen doorway very close to finished:

In the living room we still had a section of wall that needed priming.

So Brandon primed it.

Also, I heat stripped the paint off the window frame and baseboards on that side.

There are still sections of the floor that need to have the carpet padding scraped off so I’ve been finishing that job this week.

Finally, in preparation for the party, I made a batch of cookies. Ok, really this batch was just to motivate myself to keep working. Well, ok it was to bribe myself to keep working. Whatever. Cookies rock.

Last night I painted the whole living room with the same bone white that is in the dining room. I was only able to do one coat, but it’s a huge improvement from the stark white primer. Tonight I’m going to finish scraping the dining room floor (finished the living room floor on Tuesday,) do a couple of touch ups on the wood work, and possibly heat strip the woodwork around the living room front door and front windows. Brandon started putting up the wallpaper border in the dining room last night and we’ll finish that tonight. Then Friday will be for arranging furniture and cleaning up.

Phew! There’s nothing like marathon house fixing!