The Pine Floor

We've been debating about what to do with the pine floor in the guest room. I'd like to see it painted white, rather than covered, so Eric creatively put the following mandate on my plate:

DO IT YOURSELF! (Uh, thanks hon!)

Here's a photo of what I'm dealing with (and yes, I wear orange shoes):


You'll notice that part of the floor was varnished, and where we tore down the dividing walls and closets, the floor had never been finished, hence the two differing colours. There are also lots of holes from the massive nails used to nail in the divisions:

These will have to be filled with a 2-part epoxy, and I have a lot of them to do! It's too bad that most of this filling-work is going to be covered by the new IKEA closet...but I can't stomach the idea of leaving it the way it is without fixing it. I call it "integrity"; you might call this "a waste of time", or "stupidity". Well, we'll see who comes out first, says I.

Since we had intended on covering the entire floor with either carpet or laminate or hardwood, we haven't exactly been careful with the floor, and we've dropped many a tool:

There are lots of pings and dents like above. My approach to the floor is this: it's too crooked for laminate or cork or bamboo, and definitely too crooked for hardwood unless we shim the living daylights out of it. Carpet is well...carpet. What I liked costed about $10 a square foot, and then we're still looking at underpadding and installation charges. Plus we have Cooper and the cats and with the mud that abounds in spring, I just don't need one more worry. It's hard enough keeping them off the furniture.

My thinking is this: it's just grunt-work, this sanding and filling, and sanding some more. A couple of coats of paint, a bit of wait time, and we're done! If the end result isn't what we imagined, well, we can always cover it with something else. We'll just be out the cost of paint. I can live with that.

So wish me luck. I'm off to put on my grubby work clothes, crack open the window a bit to get a bit of air circulation going, and don my carbon-filter mask. I just hope I don't sand the power cord of the sander into oblivion like I did last time!

Check in later for preliminary sanding results!