Learning to Love My Heat Gun

So, I started in on the floors again. After eleven months of inactivity, it started again. Who can say why exactly? Fear? Loathing? Voodoo? Boredom? Hell, does it matter?

First, as the tumbleweed photo below indicated, I had to do a thorough cleaning to find the bloody floor. And move furniture. And this was just to finish the dining room floor, which is supposed to be finished for Thanksgiving. 2007. Just saying.

Really, I'm embarrassed at how quickly this went. I mean, I could have had this finished last year.

Here is the before picture of the unfinished portion of the dining room floor.


I finally put the old pine plugs Gary sent to good use. Thank you Gary!

Here is a gripping photo of a round plug in a round hole!

And a puttied round plug in a round hole!

And here is the money shot: the dining room floor with all of its sanding prep completed.

Of course, I missed a few spots. Details.

Since things were moving along, I decided to start on the living room floor. The wood putty I use is filled with all the marvels of modern science: carcinogens, toxic solvent, and other sixteen syllable compounds. I quickly deduced that mystery finish on the living room floor was shellac. The acetone and ethanol alcohol in the wood putty quickly reactivated it. Shellac is a lot better than lead based paint. Since I knew that it was shellac that I was dealing with, I could benefit from everyone else's houseblogging experiences. For once, I knew what to do. I dragged out my heat gun, near virginal in condition, and went to work on the shellac. Sure, I could have used the drum sander on it, but I'd be changing the paper every minute or two as the shellac gummed it up. At a dollar a roll for the sand paper, this will add up quick. I guestimate that stripping the shellac may not save me time in the long-run, but it's probably saving me $20-$30.

The shellac came right up. There appears to be three coats of it. The first is a light cherry color, the next layer is darker with an amber hue, and the final coat is a fugly poo-brown that is so dark that I originally thought it may have been paint. One wonderful thing is that they didn't shellac under the rugs, they just did the rooms perimeter. I guess they had different sized rugs over the years. The rugs seem to have gotten larger over time. This is how I can see all the different layers. Here is a picture.

Here is the next problem area. This corner is going to suck. Even after I strip the shellac, most of this section will have to be hand sanded since this corner is too small for a drum sander. Feel the pain.

Anyhow, more to come.

Omens of Things to Come

Or, a rare example of the Persian Cat Dust-Bunny Tumbleweed in its natural environment. Notice this fine specimens enourmous size.

More to come, cheers!

Home Improvement Hangover

Feeling this bad without booze is a sin. I was up until 12:30 AM trying to meet my self-imposed floor-prep deadline for the dining room and getting everything ready for the plumber.

Behold, photographic evidence that I am not a wretched, worthless DIY slacker. Well, not last night at anyrate. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to resurrect myself with coffee and aspirin.

Odious Stench

I didn’t get started on the floor until late, so I didn't make as much progress as I wanted. I figure I made it about a 1/6th of the way through in about an hour. So, with some basic math, that leaves me with at least 5 more hours to go. However, it'll probably take longer since I'll have to move furniture and patch some holes once I make it to the other side of the dining room.

Here is my procedure:

1) Loosen the dirt, filth, and gunk packed between the floor boards with a putty knife.
2) Vacuum up the aforementioned filth.
3) Putty like hell making sure to push the putty as far down into the cracks as possible. Ideally, you don't want any voids as this may lead to cracking later. Scrape off as much of the excess as (reasonably) possible. It'll save you time on the sanding segment of this project.
4) Repeat until completed. Once completed, start sanding.

Some other tips:

1) Wear a respirator. Depending on what wood putty you are using (don't use Elmer's, it's complete ass), you may not need one. However, the putty we use (sands and stains better than all the other shit we've tried) reeks. It's truly awful. There is no loopy high you get with the stain or poly, this shit is nasty. Despite the fact that is was in the mid 40's last night, I turn off the heat, opened the windows and set up several fans to ventilate. Yes, it was that bad.
2) Wear gloves. It won't kill you (well, hopefully not) if you get it on your hands, but it is unpleasant.
3) This is a task best done when no one is home. Send the family out or give then respirators.
4) If semi-dry putty begins to accumulate on your putty knife, resist the urge to scrape the blade clean on the lip of the putty tin. It'll crust up and fall into the fresh putty contaminating it. Use a rag or virtually anything else for cleaning the blade.

The dining room seems to be going much faster than the laundry room floor. Since I'm not planning to hand scrape the dining room floor (God help me, not again), I'm not spending as much time scraping off every bit of excess. That's what drum sanders are for.

My goal is to have the whole floor puttied by Thursday night. If it weren't for Halloween and a birthday party, I'd say it was a done deal. In any case wish me luck.

You Might Ask Yourself . . .

You might ask yourself, what does a thirty-one year old man do when he is home alone night after night?
They take illicit pictures of a hardwood floor. Actually, this is old pine which would technically make it soft wood. I know, what a gripping life I lead.

Anyhow, this is our dining room floor. We're planning to spend the weekend prepping it for a good, messy refinishing.

When we acquired the Devil Queen this floor was buried under a layer of thin plywood "sub-flooring" and a some fugly laminate floor tiles. Apparently, before this atrocity was committed, someone tried to refinish the floor. They never made it past the sanding. Judging from the floor's current condition, halfway through the process they decided that the horror was too much to bear, snarled a final "O, fuck it," and threw themselves, their tortured soul and the sander out the window to the hard, forsaken ground four feet below.

Bloody and bruised yet free of their terrible burden, they staggered inside and called the first disreputable contractor they could find. "Hello, it's an emergency. I need the ugliest green floor tiles you've got, and I need them now. And, while you're at it, do you have any fugly green shag carpet to match? If so, I'd like that in the living room and hallway. Can you start today? Great. I don't suppose - hypothetically speaking of course - that you know someone who could dispose of a drum-sander, discreetly of course"

Not that you can tell, but this picture is supposed to show you how much some of these floor boards are cupping. The middle of this board is at least 1/8 of an inch lower than the sides. The flash washed it out, but you can really tell where the board runs under this threshold.

The blue tape marks where holes have been drilled through the floor. Gary, thanks again for the sack of plugs.

So, thirty or forty years later, here I am picking up where a weaker, lazier (perhaps smarter) man left off. Let the blood sport begin.

Crawling to the Finish Line

The three-day weekend was nice. Aside from catching up on sleep and doing some fancy cooking, we didn't do anything too monumental. Well, there was one exception. We actually talked about working on the Devil Queen, specifically the dining room floor. This included a brief discussion of the pros and cons to laying a new wood floor over the old pine one. Even with us doing the installation, it would cost roughly $700 to $800 for a new floor. Having Kenny do it would cost roughly $1200. Refinishing the current one with a generous amount of wood-putty and patching would cost us roughly $250 (after we decided to disallow the cost of a knee replacement as a "construction cost"). We chose the cheapest route to finished.

Lots of prep-work will be needed. Bummer. Maybe I'll start on it tomorrow?

You know me, I just can't find enough excuses for crawling around on my knees, the harder the floor the better.

Some Interior Scenes

The main hall looking out down the back porch.

The living room as seen from the main hall.

The dining room as seen from the living room.

The dining room and living room as seen from the kitchen.