The weekend update

I am henpecking this post due to the fact that all the knuckles in my right hand are swollen to twice their original size after spending all weekend on the floors. My back and entire left side are also a bit of a mess. Just goes to show how out of shape I am.

These are the culprits.


And this is the fiasco.

Earlier in the week, Adam spent the better part of a day on the kitchen floor edging. It took so much time because it had all that crazy black stuff still clinging to a good portion of the floor. We then both got up bright and early on Saturday morning and made the trip down to our local equipment rental. Turns out they had already rented the edger. So they talked us into the square buffer under the assumption that it might do the edges and corners as well. So we made our way to the house and got to work. But the buffer simply lacked the power to strip the varnish. Back to the rental store.

This time we got the drum sander and a bunch of rough grit to do just the first pass on the floors; we still planned to use the buffer for edges and the more refined passes. The drum sander worked like a charm and on we went. I wrapped up the 36 grit passes in the kitchen while Adam took the drum sander to the rest of the house. Then I started following behind him to edge. That's when we discovered that the buffer doesn't have enough weight behind it at the front of the machine to do edges. Also worried that we were going to run out of belts for the drum sander. Rental store was closed. Back to the hardware store. Returned with 60 and 40 grit paper for the 5" palm sander. The 40 seemed to do an ok, if slow, job on the edges, so a trip to the big box store for a jumbo pack of 40 grit discs, gatorade, shop vac bags, the prospect of belts that fit the big sander, and beer. No belts that fit.

That process proved such slow-going that we stopped and reevaluated our strategy to get the most effective use of time and money. We were going to go ahead and do the rooms with the buffer up to 80 grit, return everything Monday; rent the edger and buffer again later in the week, edge, feathering into the rest of the floors, up to 100, and then screen everything with the buffer. But then we noticed how deep the lip is from the drum sander along the edge and decided it might be best to do everything as prescribed. This wasted much time.

At any rate, there were more trips to the store, more hemming and hawing over what to do, contemplation of trouble spots, and finally, we ended up doing the middle of all rooms up to 36 grit. We'll be edging and completing the sanding part of this ridiculousness next weekend. Hopefully.

Here's where we ended:


We also sanded the kitchen up to 80, and did parts of the edge to 120 so we could test some shellacs, wood bleaches, and stains. The gigantic water stain, as well as the super thin section of flooring in the dining room, and other sundry quandries are best saved for a later post, as is the entire issue of shellac...

Best part? When I returned the equipment this morning, I found out where the edger had been all weekend: at my realtor's house.