The Floor Is FINALLY Done!!!

It's been a long week finishing the floor, but it finally happened!  I'm ecstatic with the results!  It's so beautiful!

Last Friday, we rented the huge drum sander.  Lance was a little apprehensive about it at first, but he totally rocked it!  It didn't get all the way to the edges, so we used a hand sander for them.  We sanded twice everywhere.  It says to sand three times, but we liked what we saw after two times.  We had many family members come help.  Thank you to all of you!!!  I owe them all a treat for working so hard.  I'll do that when my kitchen is put back together.

 

Here is the beastly drum sander at work.  What a difference!!!

 

  The edges are sanded in the hallway pod.  Notice the blue tape.  We taped everything up so that sawdust wouldn't get everywhere.

Lance was the sander champion!  I helped by putting the lever up and down.  You're not supposed to have the sander down when you're stopped, even if you're changing directions.  I also held cord out of his way.  Oh, and look how we match!  That was not planned.

We finished sanding on Saturday afternoon.  We were a couple of hours ahead of schedule, so we were able to clean clean clean the rest of the afternoon.  (Much needed, since there were little particles of sawdust in the air.)

I'm putting wood putty in the crevices in the floor.  Probably one of the easier tasks.  We all had masks to minimize inhaling dust particles, which were a lot, but also a lot less than we had anticipated.

I started staining on Monday.  I wanted to start in the morning, but there was a ton more prep work to do (empty cupboards so smells wouldn't invade our food, clean the floors again, etc.)  So, I ended up starting in the afternoon.  I only stained the kitchen and hallway pod on Monday.  There was a little area in the dining room that needed a little help.  There were a couple holes in the floor that we had to fill in with wood putty.  It still needed to dry and be sanded down, so I didn't start on the dining room until Wednesday.  Tuesday, I started the polyurethane seal.  I did three coats.  Two of them on Tuesday, and one on Wednesday.  Thursday I finished up with three coats of polyurethane on the dining room floor.  I did the staining and sealing all by myself while Lance was at work.  Otherwise, waiting for him, we'd never get it done!  Needless to say, I got to know my floor VERY well.  We're buddies now.  We hang-out and stuff.

This is the floor all finished in the hallway pod looking into the kitchen.  We used red mahogany stain.  It's not too red until you shine light onto it.  It turned out a little darker than we had planned, but we like it a lot!  I love the contrast with the white cabinets!

This is the living room all finished.  The woods are different in the dining room and the kitchen.  There is a lot more grain in the dining room area.  I like how both rooms turned out.  I'm so happy with it!

It's been a long, work-filled week, but it's all worth it now!  Well, technically, not right now because it needs a week to dry and harden entirely, so I still don't have my kitchen or dining room available to me.  We stocked up on pot pies so that dinner would be accessible in the microwave, which is temporarily in the downstairs family room.  I like pot pies a lot, but I'm ready to be done eating them for a while. 

We had a wall of fans to get rid of the smell, which was extremely strong.  The fans were definitely needed and appreciated.  Thank you to Lance's mom for letting us borrow hers!  It saved us many brain cells!

 It's also been hard getting to all of the rooms in my house.  I feel like spider man sometimes, because we have to practically climb the walls to get to the main bathroom.  If we want to watch TV, we have to go out the front door, and in the back door, since all the floors in between them are off limits.  It's been an adventure.  We'll laugh about this in a bit.  Actually, I'm laughing about it now.  I feel like a little kid playing the hot lava game.  You can't touch the floor or else you'll get burned!  Well, we won't actually get burned, but we don't want footprints in our floor forever.

Here I am being spider man.  I can't touch the floors, so I have to stretch from room to room.

I feel like a huge burden is lifted now that this project is done!  There are a few little kinks that need to be worked out (fixing the baseboards and such) but it's still such a relief!  I'll post more pictures when I get the furniture back into its designated areas.