Sanding Sealer: Where the flooring project began to melt down

With our floors sanded, patched, repaired, and cleaned, it was finally time to start spreading some goop on them.  I was ready to jump straight to the polyurethane.  P decided we should put down a coat of sanding sealer first.  I don't really know what sanding sealer is, but I do believe in using appropriate primers.  And he was the one heading up this project for a reason.

We were approaching the home stretch of the project.  We could smell completion in the wind.  And boy, were we ready to be done.  After working on these floors for three weeks already, we were tired of looking at them.  And until the floors were completed, we couldn't do much work with the rest of the house--we were trying very hard not to damage our beautifully sanded, and completely unprotected by finish, floors.

So in our eagerness to get done, we were pushing the clock: working really long days on the floors, and longer evenings on weeknights after P got home from work.  That schedule was probably our first mistake.

We got our first gallon of sanding sealer, and started applying.  P was the main guy here, spreading the sealer along the floorboards.  I poured more sealer on the floor when necessary, and served as a general go-fer. 

Things were proceeding swimmingly.  When the first bottle of sealer ran low, I ran out to the kitchen, gave the second bottle a good stir, and came running back with it.  And said, "Um, P, aren't you boxing us in?"

He insisted that he had a plan.  And I figured that I trusted him.  Actually, I really prefer knowing what the plan is, but P has a really hard time putting down sanding sealer (or paint, or whatever), and coming up with words at the same time.  And based on our track record, he's always right, and I'm always confused.  So I figured it would be easiest if I trusted him and didn't bug him about what exactly this plan looked like.

Two minutes later, P looked up and realized that his plan involved boxing us in--we would be trapped in the back corner of the house, as far as possible from exits, surrounded by a sea of wet floor.

We had a few options: 1. stop in our tracks, leap across the nearly unleapable expanse of wet floor between us and the kitchen, and resume at a later date, 2. stop work where we were, and begin in the back corner, and work our way toward where we were standing now, or 3. (I think this was P's vote) box ourselves in, and wait in the corner until the sealer dried.  (Since this was our first coat, it was soaking into the floors fast, and was dry to the touch in a half and hour or so.)

I decreed option 4: take advantage of the fact that we live in a ranch, and hop out the back bedroom window after finishing.  (After P awkwardly perched on our 3" windowsill and finished coating every last square inch of floor, that is.)

So we were working along happily toward the window, until suddenly our painting pole unscrewed itself from our finish applicator, and all this dirt (more like flecks of black paint) poured out of it onto the floors!  Where did that come from! 

We did not want this trapped in our finish.  Note to self: the next time you get boxed in while refinishing a floor, be sure to have a pocket full of damp papertowels.

But I didn't, so we had to improvise.  P was working in his undershirt, so we stripped that off of him, dampened it in the hall bath sink (which was conveniently right next to the meltdown), and wiped up the floor.  (TMI, honey?)

And, moving along.  We boxed ourselves according to plan, and I hopped out the window (which was a lot higher than I had remembered--at least we had a soft landing on the grass!).  While I was standing there waiting for P to finish the last bit of floor and jump out and join me, I looked at the bottle of sanding sealer in my hand.  And realized that it wasn't actually sanding sealer.  When I had run to grab the second gallon, I had accidentally grabbed a bottle of polyuretane instead.  Well, that explained why it was so much easier to stir than the first bottle. 

Really, it was an easy mistake to make.  Check out these bottles:

Pretty similar, right?  Right?  Except this is really embarrassing for me, because, by nature, I will read ANY piece of text you put in front of me.  Anything.  The back of the cereal box, the fine print on the coupon....  If I have an idle moment, my eyes are scanning for text to take in.  Which is why I was standing out on our lawn at midnight, barefoot, reading a polyurethane bottle.  How I hadn't read it before that moment is beyond me.

The polyurethane and the sanding sealer also looked and smelled almost identical.  Which takes me back to my first point: I don't understand sanding sealer.

Anyway, the results weren't that bad.  Both adhered well to the floors, and we don't seem to have created too many problems.  There was a bit of clouding where the two touched each other--presumably they shouldn't be mixed when wet, and some of the chemicals crashed out of solution.  The good news is that it couldn't have happened in a better place than our dining room floor (which we were already planning to replace at some later date for reasons I'll explain another time).  Now that we buffed and recoated, it's almost impossible to even tell where the problem was.

All's well that ends well.  Except for the buffer.  More on that next time.

With a little help from our friends (part II)

A few weeks ago, my parents came for a long weekend. They made it very clear that they expected to work on the house during their visit, and I was expected to have a job list prepared for them.

Initially, I had planned for them to paint the walls of our front bedroom. I had completed painting the trim and had settled on a color for the walls, until P and I began having second thoughts about exactly what we would use that room for. (More on that later.) P thought I should just pick a color and we would figure out the room's purpose later. But I refused to move forward on a color until I knew what furniture was going into the room and what mood I wanted it to evoke--I guess it's a woman thing.

The gridlock on the front bedroom turned out to be fortunate, because I ended up assigning my parents a much larger project, which better suited the number of hours and hands we had available, and allowed me to squeeze every last bit of labor possible out of our guests: painting the dining room and kitchen. 

Both rooms were wood panelled (except one wall of the kitchen, which was wallpapered).  Not our thing, and it made the rooms appear darker than they were.  The kitchen already has a moderate lighting deficiency (two small east windows, both of which are shaded by our carport), so we want to maximize every bit of lighting we have.  Finally, the yellowish vinyl floor kitchen floor, combined with the paneling, wood cabinetry, and yellow-toned faux butcher-block laminate countertop and backsplash, made for an overwhelmingly yellow room.  We'll eventually replace the countertops, backsplash, and flooring, but for the time being, we needed a paint color that would tone down the yellow nature of the kitchen.

Here's what we were starting with:

We decided to paint the two rooms the same color in order to tie the spaces together.  My mom and I had been consulting by email, phone, and mailed paint chips, and thought that a light gray would brighten the spaces up and minimize the yellow cast.  I was overwhelmed by the number of gray paint swatches I liked, so made a semi-arbitrary decision to limit the field to Benjamin Moore's Historic Colors line.  I had been browsing the internet for pictures of paint colors I liked, and had asked my mother what paints she had used in the past, and was repeatedly frustrated when a color I liked was no longer in the company's catalog.  The historic colors don't change, so I'll be able to easily pick up a new gallon of paint anytime I need to touch something up.

From the Historic Colors line, we selected the Wickham Gray and Stonington Gray to test.  I followed my usually procedure and painted swatches on various walls with different lighting conditions. These two grays, more than any other color we've tested, are amazingly changeable depending on light and setting. The Wickham ranges from a light blue to a light taupe, while the Stonington swings from a light gray to a mid-range charcoal to a medium lavender. Fun!  We liked them both, but settled on the Wickham (the lighter one, on the left).  (I just want it on the record, after the bedroom paint debacle that you haven't even heard the half of yet, that we are usually capable of choosing a paint color!)    

I had planned to prime all of the wood paneling before painting, but had just put the samples directly on the paneling when testing the colors.  The paint was adhering and hiding so well, that I decided we'd just skip the priming, and paint two coats directly on the paneling.  We were using Behr's Paint and Primer in One, eggshell finish.  Skipping the primer was a good choice: even though the Behr paint promises that you'll only need one coat, I've found that that one coat needs to be thick and perfectly applied, even over primer, in order to look good.  By just putting on two topcoats, the project cost a little more (maybe up to $15 extra), but we didn't have to be nearly as exacting in our application of the paint, and things went much faster.  We also were able to use just one coat of paint in a few areas that are difficult both to reach and see.

It was wonderful to have helpers on this particular project: there was a lot of trim to paint, and a lot of careful cutting in by hand around the newly painted trim.  I discovered that my mother is really good at doing this kind of precision painting work, and is putting all of my painting in the rest of the house to shame.

And my parents are hard workers--they wore us out!  It was a lot of hard work, but a really gratifying project: two and a half days later, when it was time for them to head back home, the project was done, and the rooms were completely transformed.  P keeps saying that it doesn't even look like the same house.  He was skeptical of the painted paneling idea, but we both love the way it's turned out.

Here's a group picture just before my parents left, in front of our newly painted wall:

And a few more stunning after pics:

With the crisp white trim and the light blue-gray walls (especially on paneling, which does a nice bead-board imitation), we've discovered that we have inadvertently created a nice beach-cottage vibe.  We're good with that, and might stick with it for other parts of the house--so long as that doesn't mean we have to decorate with starfish and corals.

Cleaning the floors

With our floors repaired, puttied, and sanded, there was one more small step remaining before we started to apply finish: cleanup.  It was a bit of a drag, and took a few hours, but I didn't want to cut corners here.  It seemed silly to skimp on the easy stuff, and have all of our hard work result in a product that wasn't as good as it could have been.  So we pulled out the ShopVac (to which we've added a bag and a HEPA-quality filter), and gave all of the rooms a thorough vacuuming.  Actually, we started out extra-paranoid, and vacuumed the walls and ceilings, as well as the floors.  After a room or two, we decided that was overkill--there wasn't much dust clinging to these surfaces.

The traditional next step is to rub down the floors with tack cloth.  But our favorite flooring book (which is also the newest one out there) agreed with my gut instinct and suggested reusable microfiber cleaning cloths.  I already own a stash of these, and love them.  To spare my knees and speed the work along, I clip them into my Swiffer mop--they're just the right size to fit in there.  The Swiffer makes fairly quick work of going over the room, and the cloths pick up a LOT of dust that the vacuum missed.  I had to go over each room 3-4 times before the cloths no longer picked up much additional dust.  So a few hours later, we were finally ready to start applying finish.  And that's when things started to fall apart....

Pleasant surprises

When P and I bought the house in March, we thought that the landscaping was just azaleas and dogwoods.  I like dogwoods, but I was a little disappointed that there were no spring bulbs popping up in our yard. 

Well, two months later I'm finding that the landscaping is just mostly azaleas and dogwoods--there are also a few pleasant surprises lurking out there for me.  First, a lush peony bush appeared.  This was really exciting to me--I had been planning to buy a peony for next year.  Peonies formed that core of my wedding bouquet, so I've got a soft spot for them. 

I cut a big bunch of them and used them for a centerpiece with our Mother's Day dinner--they were amazingly aromatic, like an old-fashioned garden rose.  Nothing like the grocery store peonies I used in my wedding bouquet!

Now I've got these mystery plants coming up--they certainly look like calla lilies to me, and the timing would be right.  Another very exciting discovery--P chose to have calla lilies in his boutonniere for our wedding.  Callas are also pretty expensive to buy--usually 3 for $10--so discovering a natural source is great!  They look like they need to be thinned, so I'll do that after they bloom (assuming they do prove to be callas), and spread the wealth around the yard.

What are the chances that the two flower species we chose to use for the wedding would be the two that would appear in our yard?

Corners and edges

The random orbit sander was great at getting right up to the edges of the floors, but still, it couldn't get the last half-inch or so, nor could it get into the corners and a few really tight nooks and crannies we had.  Then there were a few boards that had particularly low corners, and we didn't want to run the sander for an extra hour to level the whole room enough to get those few extra square inches.  So all of those spaces had to be done by hand. 

This scraper was good for getting the finish off of larger areas, like corners, that we couldn't get the sander into.  We hadn't bought it with this particular job in mind (P gave it to me as a Christmas gift for refinishing furniture), but it turned out to be exactly the same width as our floorboards.  This was very convenient--it's very sharp, and I discovered the hard way that if I tried to do two boards at a time, I was liable to put a serious scratch into one.  The scraper required a good bit of strength to use effectively, so I left that one for P. 

Mostly, we used a really low-tech solution: a folded piece of sandpaper left-over from the random orbit sander.  80 grit was good for removing finish, followed by a quick polish with 120.

The difference between the before and after pictures is fairly subtle, but it was definitely worth the effort.  (Yes, the baseboard molding in this room is at carpet height, so elevated off the floor by about 1/2".  Yes, this is a problem--we can see under the boards and into the gaps along the wall.  No, we're not in any hurry to do anything about this, for reasons that will become clear later.)

Finally, P, being the meticulous guy he is, used a putty knife to scrape the worst of the finish out from between the deepest of the remaining bevels.