Waltzing Matilda

Delayed post: June 2011

So, we last left off with the floors prepped for sanding.  What I didn't mention was that we were also going to be painting the bedrooms before moving into the house (oh the joy of living rent free so one can tackle the big stuff without having to live in the chaos!- love you Mom and Dad!!)

During the weekend from hell (aka staple-fest), my mom got busy painting out the closests of the three upper bedrooms- white- yeah, we are super original aren't we!  And boy did they need it.  Ckeck out the crazy avocado colour of our hall closet.... it's amazing that they could see anything in there it was so dark!

During the week and the following weekend we tackled the rest of the painting.  It was long overdue, as they alll had ceilings the classic shade of smokers beige (gag!).

With the painting tackled, over the weekend we rented a floor sander for the floors.  Our research led us to rent an orbital sander (ours was a U-Sand) vs. the traditional drum sander, and it rocked!  The finish we were able to achieve is much more even than the other wood floors in our house which were refinished by the previous owners with a drum sander.  For any locals considering this we got ours from here, not only were they the most coveniently located to us, they were also the cheapest.

But I digress... we picked up a sander and kicked things off in the 3rd bedroom as it had the worst floors (remember the decomposed underlay the was stick to the floors, no amount of cleaners was getting that stuff off, so we resorted to sanding it off).

Having used a floor polisher in Belgium previously I was very doubtful of my abilities to "drive" the sander (my polisher experience was just like a bad cartoon with the things flying around the room with a life of it's own and my clinging to the back of it) so... I persuaded my Dad to give it a go ('cuz that's what Dad's are for right? 'cuz my Dad is a star!).

However, this thing was a dream, super easy to manuver, it was more like dancing (and yes, I named it Matilda, hence the post's title!), with a bit of ab workout mixed in!  So, in the end we all took a whirl at at and the floors scrubbed up really well, but the amount of dust was nuts, even with the vaccumm feature of the sander (heck I can still see the film of super fine dust on our living room walls walls 6 months later- but that could also be reflective of my lurve of cleaning ;) ... or how tall those walls are since we have a cathedral ceiling in that room).

Then was wiping down the floors in prep for the verathane.  We ended up going through 3 cans of verathane... partly because we had a lot of floors to do (3 bedrooms + a long hallway x 3 coats) but also becuase I learnt avery valuable lesson.... make sure you stir the can before each layer because it settles really fast- the outcome was everything was perfect until the last coat (which I had accounted exactly the right amount of verathane for), which dried ..... matt as in not shiny, which I acutally love on floors, but did not go at all with the rest of are hardwood which was high gloss- eeek!  so, down to the store I went (after a chat with verathanes customer service to identify what was the cause - me, duh! We had to spring for a 3rd can.  And, luckily it was worth it becasue we went from this...

to this....

Yeah baby!!!

So, what was the total cost for our lurverly "new" floors:

        Sander rental + sanding pads: $85.01 

        Verathane: 3x 49 = $147
        Labour (the cost of a few pizzas and burgers!)
        Total: $232.01   

That's more than $3000 cheaper than the quotes we recieved for the sanding and refinishing!