Catch up on the renovation progress!
Dudes, what a week it’s been! I’ve been away staying with family until the dust literally settled with all the floor sanding and staining that’s been going on. I’m home at last now and ready to catch y’all up on what’s been going on, as there’s been a ton of craziness and momentum. Get ready for pictures galore!
If you remember from the previous post with paint already making a huge difference, last week it was all about prepping our floors for the floor stainers coming the following Monday. This boiled down to needing to sand the floors and make a threshold in the new doorway. We started off with a high when we sanded the closet floor and it came out looking AWESOME.
Then we pulled the carpet up in the master bedroom and…well…as Karl put it, a picture is worth more than a thousand words…and “this one has a lot of 4-letter ones”.
As one can see, the original wood floor was a nightmarish mess, and Karl and I had an “oh crap” moment. Just like when the past owner showed no respect by bolting a pipe to the dining room floor and dripping paint on the baseboards, he struck again in this room. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?
First, a section of the floor had been torn up and replaced with plywood.
Then, he also walked around the room with paint on his shoes.
Last but not least, he made huge patches with car body putty to even out some areas. Let me repeat that: CAR. PUTTY.
We do know that he was a car hobbyist, so I assume he used the car putty because it was on-hand. After all, driving a literal 5 minutes to the hardware store was apparently too much of an effort.
He wasn’t too keen to even make it look nice, but just slathered it on.
These patches were solely from when they installed some very cheap and ugly track lights in the kitchen below. (note: if you like track lighting, you should probably live in a house built in the 1950’s and up. No hate, just sayin’).
Karl and I were baffled to say the least. And honestly, a bit ticked off…and not just because our work was now really cut out for us, but at how careless a person can be, especially when doing any kind of work in an old home (my fellow old house lovers, sorry if this post is making your blood pressure go up too).
Our plan became a bit different now than simply sanding the floor, but we were determined to at least try everything we could to salvage the floors before turning to a sad Plan B: re-carpeting the room.
Cue dramatic cinematic moment before diving in:
First Karl tackled the plywood. Taking some matching original planks from our attic, Karl patched them in where the plywood had been. So far so good.
Next, using a scraper and sometimes even a screwdriver, Karl scraped up as much of the putty as he could. A good bit of it came up and made the patches less noticeable already.
Now it was time for the true test: we brought in the sander. To our utter relief and joy, this is what the floors looked like after the first pass:
A little more scraping and a second pass:
Huzzah!
Here’s where the plywood had been that we patched in with wood flooring from the attic:
Ah-mazing.
My peeps, let this be an example that no old wood floor is beyond saving!
Now that things were starting to go well with the master bedroom floors, of course something else had to go wrong, right? Saturday evening Karl was in the middle of sanding when suddenly the machine stopped. Upon investigation, the plug had completely burned out! More problematic, the place we had rented the sander from had just closed 30 minutes before! Argh. It was pure HGTV drama without being scripted, lol.
We were already on a tight deadline because our floor stainers were coming Monday; we had to get the sanding done! We weighed the option of renting an abused floor sander from Home Depot and run the risk of streaks like what had happened in our downstairs floor sanding sagas, but Karl decided a better option would be to try and find a plug to replace the bad one with.
I’m so glad he knows how to do stuff like that!
Lowes didn’t have any, but Home Depot did (after some digging around, he nabbed the last one thanks to a helpful guy there. Whew). Soon Karl had it fixed and was back on track.
This is what it’s supposed to look like:
In a last-minute decision, we also sanded our upstairs hallway. It is another area that has had planks pulled up when they were re-wiring stuff, so many were uneven and a few were also splintering. Thus, there has not been a day since moving in that we have been able to go shoe-less in the hallway, otherwise we had a few splinter mishaps happen to our feet when we did not (yes, that means putting on my slippers or sandals just to get my pregnant bladder to the bathroom 2-3 times a night, lol).
Here it is sanded:
It’ll be beyond wonderful to be able to walk on this floor now! Not to mention I won’t have to prevent baby from crawling in the hallway in the future. :)
Also on the “to-do” before staining the floors was framing in the new doorway and making a custom threshold for it. Previously there were floor gaps and uneven flooring that we had to give attention to. Karl cut some small pieces to go over the floor gaps:
Here is the doorway all framed in:
Then he made the threshold ramps:
He did a nice job, wouldn’t y’all agree?
Karl did a LOT of work, the majority of it with the floor sanding this past weekend. He worked till the wee hours of Monday morning to make sure that things were ready for the floor stainers coming Monday. Give some major props to the guy, cause he was one tuckered out fella come Monday (this was him Monday morning when he woke up)!
We’ll be able to show you the newly stained floors early next week! Here’s a carrot to dangle in front of y’all until then with the color choices we laid down.
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