Yea, that's turquoise. You can see where they painted (badly) over the dark purple too. And I regret I didn't take a photo of the mint green rug on the floor....yea, the one covered in paint, glitter and some sort of hunk of wax. yea.
Anyway, our first order of business was checking out what was under the rug and determining whether we wanted to try and renovate the original floor or cover it with new floor.
Last weekend I pulled up the rug and the layer of linoleum underneath and there was a nice wood floor - painted over.
Hubby said the fatal words, "Let's see if we can save the original floor", and thus the backbreaking work began.
We went to the local Lowe's and rented a sander. Who knew the #%#$%#$ thing would be so heavy? I'm talking tonnage here. Just getting it into the car I thought Hubby might have a heart attack.
Getting it up our stairs to the second floor was a whole other story!
We bought a few packages of the recommended sandpaper circles that go with the machine. They were the easiest part of the project. They velcroed on.
The sander had a vacuum built right in, so the amount of dust was actually a lot less than I thought it would be. But Hubby and I wore the recommended masks anyway.
Aren't we cute with the smiley faces drawn on? You can't tell, but we're smiling under those masks. That might have been the last time we smiled all day. For the rest of the day and into the evening this was us:
Our biggest problem was that the floor wasn't flat (surprise!!) and the sander wouldn't get the middle of a board that was slightly concave, or an edge that wasn't perfectly lined up with the next edge. Also, the floor had a thick layer of paint, and the paint would melt right off the floor from the heat of the sander and stick to the sandpaper. So after a few minutes of sanding, we had to stop and pull all the hunks of paint off the sandpaper. It was very tedious. Thank God Hubby has the patience of a saint.
After 3 trips back to Lowe's for sandpaper (over $100 worth) and about 7 hours of hard work, the floor now looks like this:
We figured we're going to need to use a hand sander for the edges and for all those spots that we couldn't get with the floor sander. Although, after showing the photo on Facebook, I got a few comments saying we should leave it like that.
I'm thinking about it!!
3 comments:
Been there, done that, have never done it again. I feel your pain! It does look good, though.
I did our deck a few years ago - same thing. Started with the big sander, ended up on my hands and knees with the hand sander. I think you should stain it, then seal it. I used a paint roller to do the staining and it wasn't bad at all. You're through the worst part now!
We bought an almost 50 year old house in 1972 and I swear we were still working on it when we sold it in 1998. Never again. Well, of course, now we're too old to do that crap. Oy! I think I would have put the $100 towards a new floor. But then, I'm lazy. Ha ha.Good luck with the project.
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