Floors!

Well, it's been a long hiatus indeed, but we're starting a new (and thank God, much shorter) project: refinishing the hardwood floors downstairs. They were extremely old when we moved in, and now they are so bad that there's really no remaining finish, and in some cases, not much stain other than dirt and oil. Hardwood floors consist of the hardwood planks, which are then stained, and finally finished with a polyurethane coating. You may recall the days of kitchen flooring, and this is pretty much the same procedure.

One thing that can't be avoided when you refinish the floors: the need to move every single, solitary item somewhere else. And because I'm doing the whole downstairs, and the entire process takes a week or so, I can't just keep moving things from one room to the other. That'd take forever. So I stuffed everything from the living room and the dining room and stuffed it into the back room.

Empty Room! Then I rented my friend and yours, Mr. Drum Sander, who does the heavy work, and Mr. Edger, who—as his name suggests—cleans up around the edges:

Then you basically mow the floors until all the old varnish and stain are up (there's a bit of technique, but basically, you're mowing). The hardwoods are almost white when they're done. Here's an image that shows before and after in the same shot.

There were, of course, some issues along the way. Some sort of weird gummy resin-like material instantly ruined both my edger sandpapers. Hopefully it won't happen again. And the piano that we thought was on wheels and could just be rolled away into the other room. Not so much in the wheels department. Anyway, tomorrow by 5:00 pm I need to be all done with the sanding.