Floooorrrr!!!! Floor! Floor!

At long last, I have great news about my floor!  I want to show you the completed product, and ALSO show you how much danged work this was!!

Here's a floor!  Captions by Randal.
Sriusly, uuu did dis??? 

Wayt, I nos dat, I see'd u do dis.

I lik dis flur!

Sliipn on dis flur is awsm.  Zzzzz.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So that cat approves.  I am very happy, very happy!  It was a ton of work, and very much worth it.  Here's how this all went along.

It started with pulling up some carpet that seemingly was from the 70s, ew. I took the risk of finding what might be underneath.

And finding lanolium edges to pull up, and paint and varnish under that, but only on the edges, the center area was completely raw wood and quite discolored.  (I found out the reason for this is that before there was wall-to-wall carpet, they'd just tack an area rug in the center of the room and finish only the edges).  I'm super lucky that nothing was glued down.

And commense the sanding.

And Heat gun stripping of the edges where all that varnish was.  I think I saw 6 layers of various types of coatings.

But do you see the color difference between where there was varnish and where there wasn't?

So I tried bleaching the center area on advice from a website.

And plugged the worst holes from a knot that had fallen out and pipes from the old radiators.

   

But when I started sanding again with the fine grain paper to put the final smooth sheen on the wood, the color difference was still under there.  So the bleaching was a waste.

So I completed the finishing smooth sanding and cleaned up with the shop vac and teeshirt rags, sometimes the rags were used creatively such as tied around the broom to wipe the walls and ceilings down.  Sawdust is still throughout my house, I've been getting around to dusting every surface in the house, even the cans in the pantry were covered.

So, in this picture I'm not quite done with staining my first coat, having painted myself out of the house.  I started with just natural stain all over the floor, but I found that it really accented the color difference between the center and edges. You can see the bits on the left and nearest the door are quite dramatically a different color than the bit you can see farther in the room.  The few boards in that swath in the center aren't stained yet at all.

So I got cherry color stain and put that just on the edges to darken them to make them match better.

And proceeded to erect an "exterior stairwell" as I called it for the next few days.  I figured that with locked windows, the ladder didn't effect security any more than having windows on a first floor does when they're locked.

Here it is with the color touch up and the first coat of polyeurethane on. Shiney! 

After all the staining, it was time to install new baseboards (which incedentally, I keep calling them floorboards, and I know it's wrong but I just keep saying that!)

It took my dad and I and dad's miter saw 7 hours of straight hard labor to get the baseboards all installed.
And finally I could start moving in!

And here is my vblog of the completed floor.  :)  There's another vblog about how strongly this project effected the rest of my life, but I'm not ready to post that one.  Not at all.

And "Floor" is a wonderful interjection, by the way.  Better than any curse word.  It tends to evoke confusion in passers by, and indeed in anyone who is not in-the-know.  One friend became so facinated by my floor project, he renamed me Flora.  I think this is PERFECT, and if I ever am in need of a pen name, Flora will be the ticket!  Yaaaaay, I have a floor!  And I've had several dinners at the table, it is no longer novel having a table at which to eat.  Thank god for that.