Hardwood floors, part deux

Remember those hardwood floors? I know it has been awhile, but several weeks ago, they were finally finished!


Aren't they beautiful?? Hubby is overly critical of his work and keeps telling me (and anyone else who will listen) that they are not professional quality, but I don't think anyone is going to look THAT closely at them. It did create a nasty little monster in hubby after all of his hard work though--it would be the "we cannot walk, touch, or move near the floor with shoes on" monster. That gets frustrating very quickly. Every time we plopped on the couch to watch tv it would scootch just a little across the floor and he would moan. And I do mean every time. I was also banned from wearing heels across the floor, or any shoes for that matter. Bare feet were banned as well, which meant only socks were allowed on this hallow ground. All of these rules also meant I could hardly function as a normal person in the room.

About a week after the floors were finished I went to Lowes and ordered rugs. Problem solved. Now we can not only use the room like normal people, but it keeps the floor warmer, helps eliminate echos, and adds just the right touch the room was looking for. Of course, the only reason I think hubby was ok with it was because our cat (details on her reserved for yet another post) refused to walk across the hardwood floor because it was too cold for her paws and would leap around on the furniture to get to her favorite window perches. She's happy now too.

Now if we could just attack this beast in the corner the room would be complete.


Alas, Rome wasn't built in a day, and clearly, neither will this house.

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.