The spring weather has arrived and that means it is time to get to work on all the projects we have to get this house fixed up. To kick us off, we began tackling the living room floors – for us to do anything else, we need to get these floors refinished and in the meantime we also started testing out some paint colors – so exciting!
Back in October when Chris came to see the house for the first time and sign the paperwork, he discovered just how bad the pet urine smells were. Our realtor warned us but we weren’t quite prepared for how bad it might be. Chris and his friend Victor, quickly got to work to try and mitigate some of that smell before we hurled ourselves across the country. It turns out, the strongest smell was coming from the mud room so they ripped out the crappy laminate flooring there in hopes it might get better. They also figured maybe sanding the sub floor, along with the pine flooring might get rid of some smell too. The bad news is it didn’t really do much for the smell, and it definitely coated everything in a fresh layer of dust but the good news is there wasn’t too much smell from the areas with pine flooring in the main part of the house.
To make a long story short – we have been living with rough sanded pine flooring (the mudroom has just been sealed in plastic for us to deal with later) and we needed to do a bit more sanding to get these floors ready to take a new finish.
We moved all of our stuff out and made the dining room our temporary living room, assembled our new powerful shop vac, and then we headed over to Home Depot to rent a heavy duty floor sander. Even though it takes some muscle to control the machine, using the big sander was probably the easiest part of the whole process. We then vacuumed, more than a few times, to get as much of the dust out of the room as possible. It was a long day but ever so satisfying to see how nice these freshly sanded floors look.
We were all done with the big sander so back to Home Depot we went to return that and gather the supplies for the new finish. There was also a bit more detail work to ensure the wood can take the new finish correctly. To get all the way to the edges, we removed the trim but there were a few spots that needed some detail sanding, around the fireplace hearth and the step leading into the dining room. Once we finished that, we let the dust settle out of the air and did another full vacuum the next day. The final step of cleaning up this dust is using a cotton cloth and mineral spirit to wipe the entire surface – this helps get the last bit of fine dust and was definitely the most annoying part of this process.
At last – the floors are ready, our tools are ready, and we are mentally ready to start laying down the new finish in the hopes it all turns out and looks amazing. And now, we wait… To apply the oil based polyurethane, it needs to be dry outside, not too humid, and a steady 56 degrees and warmer to adhere properly. So of course, this week has been cool, cloudy, and raining off and on. So while we wait, we are dipping our toes into some of the other rooms and have made plans to take care of a few things at the cabin until the weather conditions are just right.
Check out progress photos here. There is so much more to come – stay tuned!
