Out of Plumb

Refinishing the floor in our living room was a bit of adventure. I did the entire demo with the original chocolate brown carpet in place. It was nice because I was able to roll up all of the mess when we were done. What was exciting was pattern exposed on the back side. Apparently the living room was used as some sort of a stockyard. Urine stains blossomed in great splendor, a regular cornucopia of urea.

After pulling up the carpet we found ourselves in a bit of a dilemma, more carpet or go wood. Underneath the padding was a worn and stained fir floor, do we refinish or cover over? In the end the deciding factor was money, I could, doing the work myself, refinish much cheaper than covering over. Now came a question of timing, do I sheetrock first and then refinish or do I refinish and try not to mark it up doing the sheetrock? In the end I decided to do both, I would sand and put 2 layers of finish sealer down, cover the floor, sheetrock and then cleanup and put the final coat on. It worked ok, the masking tape was down too long and finish was too new so removing it caused some damage at the edges.

From the start it was a bit of a comedy of errors. First when we pulled back the padding we found a bullet hole. Yep you read me, a bullet hole. Seems the previous owner had left a loaded hunting rifle in the living room that his mother then accidentally set off while cleaning. After patching that (use a small router to plunge through floorboards on either side of the defect and cut them off at random lengths so it will blend) I started to sand. I was using a drum floor sander borrowed from my father-in-law. It’s a beast, 40 years old 50 plus pounds easy. Put some paper on it, switched it on and flap, flap, flap the paper came spitting out of the machine in shredded chunks. After tinkering with the paper clamp for a while I found a way to keep it on. Fired it up touched it to the floor and pulled back to expose a beautiful strip of fresh wood and globs. Globs? Turns out the belt was melting the old varnish which then stuck to the belt, floor and machine bringing the whole operation to a halt. Left us with two options strip the floor with a chemical stripper or scrape the varnish off. I did the latter, figuring stripper cleanup would take longer than doing it by hand. I was wrong. It took days and piles of new but hopelessly plugged sandpaper to get it all done.

In the end it was worth it. The floor is awesome; we managed that balance between rustic and new perfectly. It is rich honey amber in color and shimmers with a satin glow. The combination of age and staining is something hard to reproduce. If I had it to do over I would have hit that baby with a chemical stripper first thing and I bet that would have shaved days off the job, but the effect on the patina is something I can’t predict. I also would have cut the first coat of finish 75/25 with mineral spirits. I think that would have allowed the finish to soak deeper into the wood and toughen it up. Fir floors are not hardwood floors. Drop a CD case and you will leave a mark on my floor. I have no idea why they are all the rage today. It might be fine in an upscale yuppie home but in a rough and tumble home like ours with dogs it is going to show its age. I suppose it is always easy to touch it up. What I love most is when people ask about how we got it to look like that I can look them in the eye and say “peed on it”. The expressions are priceless.

# posted by Acme66 @ 10:15 AM