Gettin’ the shine on

Looking back

For your viewing pleasure, I’ve included the above photo which shows how the room looked on our first visit to the property. Those floors. Wow. No windows. Only screens. No lake view. Remember, there used to be a massive banyan tree blocking the view. It’s come a long way!

More Sanding

I came up for a solo trip this weekend. My goal was to finish sanding the floor and then to get the shine on. Sunday morning I started getting after it early. Last weekend I had done the major grinding on the floors that removed the old finish and some of the original gray floor paint that was under the poly. My next step was to flatten out the floor from any divots or uneven areas and then work my way up through the grits.

Lots of sandpaper

This part was pretty uneventful, which is good, except for burning through a bunch of sandpaper. The old pine floors sand easy enough except that the sap in the wood tends to gum up the sandpaper. Quickly. So I kept changing paper and working my way up through the grits until I got to 120 grit. After sanding with 120 grit with the grinder I swapped over to a random orbit sander using 120 grit to remove the heavy scratches from the grinder.

It would have been too easy

And this is where things went downhill. I’ve never actually ran into this before and I sure hope I won’t run into it again; but here’s what happened. The floors have gaps between the boards and over the years those gaps have accumulated sand from the yard. Well the vibration from the sander caused the sand to bounce out of the cracks and land between the sandpaper and the floor. This left nasty scratches in the wood that needed to be sanded out. About the time you finish sanding those scratches out, more sand comes out and leaves more nasty scratches. I swept, I vacuumed, I tried everything I could think of, and it kept happening. And I had already started so I had to finish otherwise one part of the floor would look different than the rest.

Yes, I’m stubborn

Well what should have been a 30 minute sand turned into a 4 hour struggle. Fortunately I’m pretty stubborn. Well, I think fortunately. Whatever. I pushed through it and got it done. Sunday evening I was able to get 2 coats of sealer on the floor and that was enough. For the floor, I’m using Bona products. The first coat of sealer I used their clear sealer which is just as it sounds – crystal clear. For the second coat, I used their amberseal sealer. This adds a nice golden hue to the wood which resembles a the color of a typical oil based finish. The Bona products are water based so they won’t yellow over time like oil based finishes will.

Time for top coats

Monday morning I was back at it early. I gave the floors a light scuff with 320 grit and prepped them for the final coats of floor finish. For the top coats, I’m using Bona Mega. Their Mega line is a good residential product and is reasonably priced. I mopped on a coat and then turned my attention to the living room. We’ve done lots of different types of projects over the last 2 months and the master bedroom and the living room have become a catch all for “stuff”. So I went through and organized. Much better. By this point the new floor finish was dry enough to walk on so I mopped on the final coat. That’s the great thing with Bona products, as long as you recoat within 48 hours, you don’t have to sand between coats.

More floor sanding

Lastly, while I had all of the sanders out, and since the living room floor was free of “stuff”, I started grinding on the epoxy fills that I’ve been doing to the termite damage. The epoxy fills that I did with the boat epoxy sanded beautifully. The epoxy fills that I did with the fast setting epoxy…well, they didn’t sand nice at all. The 60 grit paper on the grinder just heated it up and turned it into a gooey mess. I tried a bunch of different solutions and I think I can get it to sand with real low grit sandpaper – like 24 grit, which is super coarse. I’ll get some on order and I’ll give it a go.

Moving lumber. Again.

Before I left, I loaded up a bunch of pecky cypress. I know what you’re thinking……didn’t I just bring the pecky cypress to the house from my shop? Well, you’re right. Evidently I really like moving lumber piles. The pecky cypress will be the ceiling covering in the bedroom. All of the boards will need to be planed, finished, and routed so I figured it would be easier to bring the boards back to my shop than to bring my shop to the boards. This will give me something else to work on this week because I don’t quite have enough going on yet!

Got 9 minutes? Watch me put on the 1st coat

And if you wait until the end, you can hear me singing with Axl Rose. Until next time. Yall stay safe out there.