Oh, God. I'm never going to finish.
Anyway, the floors look pretty sweet! Check out these awesome, completely sanded floors!
Except for the minor problem of constantly needing to move the piano…
And the television set…
In order to sand behind and underneath them, it's all good. With the help of the drum sander and some heavy duty sandpaper, things went pretty smoothly, if not exactly fast. The edger proved to be more trouble, however. When I tried it out yesterday, I had big problems. That is, when you start to use it on the finished floor, after a few moments the sandpaper gums up completely with the finish that was already on the floor, which then melts and turns into a resin-like hard lacquer that covers the surface of the sandpaper. This is kind of a drag. Yesterday, it destroyed the sandpaper in the edger within 10 to 15 seconds. And I only had a few pieces of sandpaper for the edger. When I went back to the rental shop, they gave me some much heavier grade sandpaper, which did the trick. This sandpaper burns out after only a minute or two, but that's much better and allows me to get most of the job done in relatively short order. This is what the edger sandpaper looks like after it's dissolved the finish on the floor into that hard, resin-like material. And by the way, the phrase "burns out" is quite apt: when the paper has lived out its useful life, it lets you know by beginning to smoke, or, more dramatically, occasionally turning directly into black ashes that fly every which way as the paper begins to smolder.
So where does that leave us? Well, the living room is almost completely finished — all of the edges are done at 60 grain sandpaper, and about 2/3 of it still needs to be done with 100 grain sandpaper. The dining room is only partially done with 60 grain, and still needs to be done entirely with 100 grain. That's probably another couple of hours tomorrow morning. Not surprisingly, this whole process generates an enormous quantity of wood dust, which I dedicate to my loving wife. I'm saving all my dust for yooooooooooou!
Anyway, it looks pretty good when it's finished.
Our previous neighbors, for reasons that only they can know, decided to cut a hole in the living room floor (see above) so as to pass an electrical outlet through it. Never mind that there was already an outlet in the living room floor (see smaller hole, above). No, they just cut raggedy, asymmetrical pointless hole in the floor, 'cause that's how they roll. Both holes are currently fully exposed, and after ten years (ten year!) I managed to remove the outlet from the second, more modern hole (curiously, the first electrical socket is original, from 1930, making wonder what people had to so urgently power in the middle of their living room floors back then? I'm guessing: Prohibition-era still.). I'm hoping to do something about at least one of them, because they're unsightly, and serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever. The last time we had an electrician in the house, he immediately disconnected the central socket because it was so completely unsafe. The original one was disconnected decades ago. I'd like to fill it up with something, but I'm not completely sure what. Matching it to existing hardwood flooring would be basically impossible. In any event, there's still quite a bit of edging left to do. Below, you can see what a typical floor looks like after you've drum sanded the main portion of the floor, and the edges that remain. When, for the love of God, will someone invent a drum sander that can get within an inch or two of the wall?
One slight complication. As it turns out, the edger is so powerful it can strip off not only significant quantities of wood from the floor in just a few seconds, but also ceramic tiles. We have green tiles all in front of the fireplace, and it is certain point, I accidentally let the edger pass a little bit too close to those tiles.
Here's the scary part: it didn't even make a sound as it instantaneously sliced off a substantial portion of one of the tiles. Ceramic is essentially rock. The edger kills rocks. It kills them so fast, they don't even have time to scream. When it hits a nail or a staple in the floor, at least there's a shower of sparks to let you know that something serious is happened! It give you some real appreciation for what it could do to a human body, if you weren't paying careful attention. Unlike previous years, however, I've been performing all of my safety precautions (goggles, mask, shoes, gloves) quite rigorously all the time. The only injury today was a very, very tiny cut on my little finger from a small piece of exposed wire (not electrical) on the drum sander, and of course, my lower back, from all of that moving of the piano!
Tomorrow, I finish edging, and go to Home Depot for stain, wall putty, paint, polyurethane and whatever else I can think of (a small screw to fix my sunglasses! Blank DVDs!). Also, I have the edger for the whole weekend, so I can even take a day off. (Fat chance of that happening!)
Bonus action shot taken by Jim before he helped me load the drum sander into the car. The drum sander weighs like a hundred pounds. I was okay doing everything else on my own (although Jim helped me with the piano the second time), but there was no way I was going to lift that thing into the trunk of the car on my own. Even the pitiful little edger weighs a motherfucking ton. Also, while I'm whining, my fingertips feel all nasty and raggedy, like—oh, wait, like they'd been rubbed over sandpaper all day! Because… they were!
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3 comments:
hey, for your holes you could do something like this:
http://www.inlays.com/IPW-Collection-s/1918.htm
Square or round cut. Might look pretty cool.
The heart is lovely! But I'll point out that I don't think what's on your feet there actually counts as shoes. Remember the counter top? There are old running shoes in the basement that would make me feel much better.
oh god, yeah, the countertop. What you need, my brother, is some steel/composite toe work shoes. You should be able to get them anywhere, even Walmart has 'em (wouldn't get them there, though) and they can really save your feet when working with heavy stuff.
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