Thursday, March 15, 2012

Floor work

Our main level is on the list for some TLC.  When we first saw this house, the floors were one of it's finest features.  Unfortunately, the previous owners has strategically placed rugs and furniture.  I'm not sure how much you will be able to tell in the before and after pictures, I can't see it very clearly.  These are very nice looking floors when you keep your face a long ways away!  When you get down and look carefully, there are scratches and gouges and weird spots where the stain didn't go on very evenly or where the poly bubbled up.  The wood is pine, so it's fairly soft for being in such a high traffic area.
We took one of our "between major projects" weeks and cleaned up the entry and living room floors with a good scraping/sanding and a fresh coat of poly.
Before

During
Working hard
The bubbles in the old poly had to get scraped off with a paint scraper, it was one of those cases of "it looks a lot worse before it looks better".  Brian manned the sandpaper and I worked the scraper.  This is a "rustic" floor and it has the old-school nails.  All those nail-heads make it so we couldn't use the power-tools methods here.  I bet Super Jim could actually have done a good job with this (he's our very trustworthy and excellent wood flooring guy, Noah added the Super to his name!), but we do like to practice a little DIY whenever feasible.

After
It made a nice improvement!  We'll definitely be able to keep this floor off the "do something about it" list for another few years after that treatment.  
May 2011

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