The Pine Floor - Part Six

And we have lift-off!

The first coat of primer is down.  I did the cutting around the edges with a brush, and Eric rolled with a 5/8" nap roller.  As he rolled, I filled in some of the deeper gaps which he then later stepped in.  Oh well.  My intentions were good.  The whole job didn't take more than 1-1/2 hours, which was welcome, considering how long we took to remove the Varathane, and sand like mad-people.

We're happy with the effect.  It's an old floor, and the imperfections are still visible, yet it's a clean, solid surface.  It's what we were envisioning, and we're happy.

No, let me take that back.  We're ecstatic. 

We're not sure when we'll reapply the second coat.  Zinsser instructions say 45 minutes between re-coats, but we're waiting longer than that, considering the surface we're covering.  I'd hate to have the paint start to wrinkle or worse.  We've seen a couple of misadventures in wood finishing, so we're going to err on the side of caution and wait a day or two.  We'll see what the humidity is going to do as well. Zinsser says not to apply if the relative humidity is above 85%.  Today we're at 86%, and going up to 26C, which is going to feel hotter and more humid as the day wears on.

This product is really thin, yet extremely opaque with a good coverage.  I think I'll have this stuff under my fingernails for the balance of the week, it's that tough.

The Pine Floor - Part Cinq

So, here's what we learned today:

Sandblasting a pine floor is labour-intensive, back-breaking and, as an added bonus, sandy and dusty.

Sort of like everything we're doing these days, come to think of it.

But we discovered something new.  While sandblasting is messy, and the interior of our house now feels like a Scirocco wind blew through it, it was effective, just slow.  The nozzle we have is a 1"diameter, and it would have taken forever to do the entire room, so we did a small area, and put on our thinking caps.

(In the meantime, I was trying to figure out what I could sandblast, given we had the compressor out and everything set-up.  I came up empty - sad really - because often I come across things and wonder, hmmm, wonder if I could sand-blast that?  Owning a big-ass compressor just so I can sand-blast stuff at my leisure is one of my dreams).

Again, I digress.  Back to the floor:

When we combined the sandblast grit with our 40- and 50-grit sanders, (I got the sissy Fein, Eric got the hefty Porter-Cable 1/2 sheet), we were able to sand the floor without having the sandpaper clog incessantly.  That was our epiphany.  More good news is that the sandblast grit added the abrasion we needed to remove the sticky Varathane residue much quicker.  And even more good news:  the paint on the area where we did our scratch test is even harder now.  This means that hopefully tomorrow, after we go over the floor one more time with the "house" vacuum (as opposed to the shop vac), and neurotically go over everything one final time with a microfibre cloth, Eric can put down the first of three coats of primer.

Obviously, using sandblast grit means we're both wearing full-face masks, as well as our hearing protectors.  It felt funny to have the full-face mask on again.  It's been a few months since I wore it, and I didn't miss it one bit.  At the end of the day, taking off the hearing protectors and mask felt so good.

I'm thrilled with today's events.  I'll be even more thrilled when the first coat of paint is down.

The Pine Floor Update

Well, here we are several hours later. I had hoped to sand 14 boards in the guest bedroom, (I'm very goal oriented like that!), but in the end, my arms gave up so I only managed to finish about half of that. Basically I've proven yet again the golden rule of home renovation time estimation: Estimate X hours = 2*X. Or something like that.

That little bit of algebra aside, sanding the part of the floor that had absolutely no finish on whatsoever went great. I actually ended up using 40-grit sandpaper, and my fave Porter and Cable 1/2 sheet orbital finishing sander. The box says, "vibration free", which I am here to tell you, unless you're made of rubber, is an utter misnomer. Also, the paper clogged frequently, even using 40-grit, and this had me cursing. Changing the paper in the P and C sander is a real pain in the butt, unless you've got 3 hands.

I had the window open a crack, and had the shop vac going nearly the entire time, so the dust was not that prohibitive. I always wear hearing protection and a high-quality carbon filter mask, but even with a well-adjusted mask, there was still a lot of dust in the inside the mask at the end of the day.

The little milking stool comes in very handy when doing jobs like this. Some days, I'd like to have it permanently attached to my posterior. Sitting on this bench makes any task not-quite-ergonomic, but infinitely superior to kneeling.

On that note, I leave you with today's sunset:

Enjoy!

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!

And then there was...paint.

Finally, the long-awaited day of painting the guest room finally dawned. If you remember correctly, Eric's parents were due to visit, and time was of the essence to finish the guest room before their arrival last May. But it was not to be. In the end, we offered up the master bedroom to his parents, while we slept in a Gyproc-clad room. Look on the bright side - at least we had a door.

With the background of this giclée print serving as inspiration, we wanted a colour that was not too yellow, and not too orange, not too bright, and not too light either. That narrowed things down to 12, 876 colours.

After much hemming and hawing, (I'm being PC: we were fighting and arguing), we chose a colour:

The walls are Gildden's "Ginger Peachy", a misnomer as the end result is neither ginger-y or peach-y, which was my greatest fear. I didn't want the quintessential pastel guestroom of horrors, but rather a warm, comforting ambiance by day or by night. The ceiling is Glidden's "A Touch of Nectar". (Who comes up with these names? And can I have their job?) These two colours are one beside the other on the Glidden palette, however, the two colours can't be more different. One has more ochre, the other more fuschia, yet somehow, they work harmoniously.

We have a fierce loyalty to Sico paint, so we decided to use Sico professional paint, and have them custom mix the Glidden colours. Erring on the side of caution, Eric went out and bought "A Touch of Nectar" first, and painted all walls and ceiling with this colour. The end result was too pale, and didn't really match the colour on the paint chip perfectly, so we took the darker shade just above it, "Ginger Peachy", and painted the four walls with this shade, leaving the ceiling in "A Touch of Nectar". The end result was just right.

Aesthetics aside, the most shocking part of all, here's the temperature four hours after lighting a fire in the wood stove located downstairs, after not having heated all day:

Unreal. 18.4C.

We went from this:

From -3 to 18 degrees without even really trying! (Well...trying to heat that is! We tried really, really hard with the rebuilding and insulation).

Well bowl me over...

The comfort level of the guest room is high. The floor's not quite finished, (let me get RIGHT ON THAT!), so we haven't moved any proper furniture into the space, but the room feels good. Comfortable insulated goodness all around.

Compare it to the uninsulated hell we were subjecting guests to before:

And it's a miracle guests actually come back to our house, isn't it?

In all fairness, the photo above was taken after we tore down the old pine bead-board - we weren't living in a complete hovel, it only looks that way.

Above, you can see the 2x6's Eric used to beef up the outside wall, and the 6" layer of Roxul insulation he placed between the studs. This is a west-facing orientation, and the kilometre of open field across the road (read: wicked winds!) meant this room was virtually inhabitable during the winter before our renovations. Turning on the baseboard meant heating the great outdoors, so we simply shut the two rooms on this side of the house when cold winds blew. (Which is what, realistically? Four months of the year?)

The rot above was found on the south side wall, essentially behind where the headboard of the bed meets the knee-wall. This rot was the worst we found, and the super-fine dust created by trimming the bad wood away permeated its way through the ENTIRE house. It was far worse than Gyproc dust, and I thought that was bad.

Now, we have straight, colourful walls. An inviting atmosphere, compared to the knotty pine purgatory of before.

The old pine floor had been shellac'd or varnished, I never did find out which. But it was I who dutifully got down on hands and knees for three days, and using a heat gun and putty knife, removed the entire finish. Now we (the Royal "We") are going to sand using 60 grit sandpaper, and paint the entire floor white. We might live to regret this decision (well, truth be told, I already do, since Eric's attitude about a white floor came down to this, and I quote: "You want a white floor? Well fine, YOU get a white floor...have fun doing it, because I won't").

Which leads me to another story, for another day.