What are people thinking?

Today was day 1 of finishing the hardwood floors in our house. It has taken quite some time to get to day 1, so we'll start at the beginning of this floor story, way back in December.

When we first moved into our house, the floors looked like this:


Super attractive. Hubby described it as "Sunday school classroom carpet", only in a lovely shade of mauve that I'm pretty sure they stopped selling in 1987. So after prodding around the edges of the room, we saw promising glimpses of hardwood floors and we, well mainly I, made the executive decision that Sunday school carpet was coming up. Hardwood floors couldn't be that difficult to do.

Little did I know what awaited us. With surprisingly little effort, up came the carpet and padding, only to reveal the biggest mess either of us had ever seen on a floor.


Yes, along with the normal tack strips and staples, the carpet padding had been held in place by tar. TAR. Who ever thinks "tar on a hardwood floor is a brilliant idea"?? So we went to work with every idea people threw at us to remove each little patch of tar. We scraped, Windexed, scraped, Orange-glowed, scraped, glue-goned, scraped, paint-thinned, and scraped a little more with very little result. I suppose my father either felt really sorry for us or was tired of the complaints that lasted at least a week, and rented the fancy drum sander to take off the tar. It did the trick and in one 20-grit pass, our floors went from tar-central to remotely normal looking.


We were amazed. We admired the floors and thought that surely there couldn't be that much more sanding to get done, in the back of our minds knowing that every time we'd thought that, we were normally very wrong. Unfortunately, the floor work had to take a back-burner to many other projects, the future topics of many posts to come, and after about 6 weeks, we decided it was time to get the floor work going again. So off hubby went to trusty Arrow rentals for 2 sanders and at least 60 sheets of sandpaper to get our floors in tip-top shape, after of course getting a long lecture from my father about how to properly sand a floor. The dust literally flew everywhere, but hubby worked diligently through it (the haze in the picture is the flash reflecting off the dust).


That was a week ago. Hubby has spent all that time trying to get all the aforementioned dust off the floor and out of the room, cleaning the floors at least twice a day with nearly every cleaning product imaginable. But, after many weeks of waiting, he completed day 1 of polyurethane-ing today, and was so proud he emailed a picture to me.


We of course still have re-sanding the floor between each of the two additional coats that will have to be put on the floor, but the end is possibly in sight. So much for a simple, easy project.