Floors

After we bought the farmhouse, one of my first missions was to pull up the carpet and see what was underneath. Thankfully, most of it was salvageable random-width pine flooring but it definitely needed some work. Before we made the move, I decided to rent a drum sander and an edger for a week and see what damage I could do. While clearly not to the level of a professional, the floors turned out pretty decent. I used oil-based polyurethane for the finish -- the stuff stinks to high heaven and takes forever to dry, but it gives a really nice warm glow to the floor.

So, about that drum sander. If you've never used one, be prepared: they are a beast to control and require constant attention in order to do a half-decent job. It's easy to gouge the floor and do some serious damage, so it's vital to keep the sander moving steadily as soon as it makes contact with the floor. We had some added work since carpet glue around the edges of several rooms just gunked up the sander on first pass. What a total pain in the ass. We had to use some heavy-duty (and unbelievably noxious) chemical stripper to first remove the glue. After that painstaking process I countersank each nail before sanding, and then resank any shiny heads after changing to a new grit sandpaper (I went 36-60-80-100). With that in mind, I still ripped a number of rolls of paper on nail heads, which is a costly mistake - the stuff ain't cheap. At the left is an image of the bedroom floor after it was sanded.

The dust will get absolutely everywhere -- luckily we had no furniture in the house, so I cracked the windows and went to town while wearing a HEPA filter. After a week I had the floors done and started with the polyurethane. I had read that an lambswool applicator pad was the best method to apply the poly, but when I went to the store to pick up the stuff I was told a short-nap roller would do just fine. Total nonsense. The roller left a series of small bubbles in a few layers of the polyurethane, but I only realized it after the poly was all down -- a total of four layers. It's not noticeable unless you look, but it's still annoying.