We did it! The dining room floor has been successfully stripped of carpet and padding, sanded (and sanded and sanded), stained, and coating with layers of polyurethane. The 100 year old wood glows and shines.

Today we began moving furniture back into the room (and out of the other rooms!) Order is being restored. We triumphed. Hurrah! 6 years ago

The final coat of poly has been applied and we’re just waiting for it to harden fully before we move the furniture back in. I think I can count this a sucess. 6 years ago

I applied coat 4 of the water-based polyurethane last night about 2 AM (gotta love productive insomnia, eh?) and coat 5 around noon today. The can is pretty empty but I think I can squeak one more thin coat on before the day is out. Then, all that’s left is the waiting game for the surface to harden fully.

The novelty of having everything folded in on itself to avoid the dining room has FULLY lost its charm. Can’t wait to be done. It’s looking pretty darned good too. 6 years ago

Sure, I can be ironic about this NOW but yesterday when we started to stain we discovered areas where our sanding hadn’t been so… thorough, shall we say. The stain soaked up into the wood and darkened it instead of accenting the grain as it was supposed to.

In the words of Pooh, Oh Bother.

I don’t quite know what to do but I bet it will involve more sanding and paper that gums up with the partially dried stain. And cursing. Can’t forget the cursing.

On a positive side, I’ve written a pretty good poem about refinishing floors and the marital stress that can result. 6 years ago

So the room is prepped and ready for the first coat of stain, a Colonial Maple to get a nice warm under coat. Later today, I’ll wipe on some Special Walnut to make the grain pop out a bit. This leaves us “on schedule” to start with the top coat tomorrow. I want to put down about a million coats of polyurethane because this room will get a lot of traffic with dining room chairs and everything. So if I can recoat this water based poly ever two hours, then a million coats should only take me until… 6 years ago

Last Monday, the first day of my vacation, July 3rd to be exact, Mib7 and I carried everything out of our dining room and plopped it into our living room. It didn’t matter much where we put stuff because I was certain-DEAD CERTAIN- that the project would be finished ENTIRELY by Wednesday morning. This certainty meant that we we sure to get all our supplies on Monday because we feared everyplace would be closed on July 4th. Some might attribute this to inexperience EXCEPT WE DID THE EXACT SAME THING less than twelve months ago when we re-finished the living room floors. Only that time, the room was out of commision until late September!

So our overstuffed lives are a bit compressed, and everything is generously sprinkled with dust. What’s keeping us going is knowing how totally wonderful it’ll look…. someday. 6 years ago

Where chaos reigns supreme. 6 years ago