Subscribe via RSSYou Give Floors and bad stain
Monday, November 12, 2007 |
My wife and I fancy ourselves “Do-it yourselfers”, which means we get in over our heads quickly. Case in point—floor refinishing. My wife and I were watching one of those home improvements shows and they showed a guy refinishing old dilapidated-seen-their-better-days floors. We look to each other and then we looked at our old oak floors. The seed was planted.
Fast forward to me at the tool rental shop picking up the monster sander. It was heavy and shiny and looked exactly like the one from the home improvement show. So far so good.
I got the beast home, lugged into the house and plotted my conquest on the unsuspecting floors. Should I start in the breakfast nook? No, maybe in the dining room. Oh the possibilities!
It was time to fire up the sander. I flicked the switch and I was off.
Surprisingly, it seemed just like the home improvement show. I walked slow and from beneath the sander came magically smooth floors. The magic continued for six long hours or so through several grits of sandpaper and a trip to the eye doctor to get a glob of sawdust removed from my wife’s eyelid (I blame the sawdust).
When we returned, what laid out before us was a sea of freshly hewn oak ready for color. My wife and I were exhausted from the sanding and a little drunk with the ideas of new floors, began staining the wood. This is the part of the story where the clock spins rapidly and there’s a sped-up clip of two people applying stain to a huge floor. When we finished, we collapsed into bed. The next day, we awoke and saw what we had done. Our judgment was clouded with visions of “This Old House” and heavy petroleum fumes. The staining was….dreadful. I cursed Bob Villa’s name inaudibly and I prayed to the Patron Saint of woodwork mistakes. How can we live with such awful floors? Who has cursed me? My beautiful wife was visibly irritated with me. What could have been “Better Homes and Gardens” became “Mangled Wood Monthly”.
Unwisely, we decide to put a coat of polyurethane onto the floors cementing our horrendous staining forever. I wanted to use a brush, but the home improvement show showed how easy it was to use a sponge pad on a long stick to mop on the finish. “I can’t screw that up”, I thought. Boy was I wrong. I began slathering the poly onto the floor and any excess stain on the surface of the wood began to congeal giving the floor a muddy Missouri River look. It was like the floors were rejecting the poly like a mutated cell or something. I wanted to make a break for it, but the door was on the other side of the freshly coated floor. I was trapped. I couldn’t even gnaw off my own sawdust-covered foot to escape. DRAT!
The coating dried and I cried. I have never taken the name of Bob Villa in vain as many times as I did that day. There it was----a shiny gloppy floor stretching from the kitchen through he open dining room into the main living room. We can never have anyone in our house ever again. That was it. No family gatherings, no slumber parties. Nothing. We may as well just lock the doors and upgrade our cable TV package. We won’t be going anywhere for a while.
Finally, after hours of thought and regret, I concede. I begin resanding the floor. I get a do-over. Plus I got a few tidbits of wisdom from the experience:
1. Never believe anything you see on a home improvement show.
2. No matter how many times to call him, Bob Villa will not stop by to help you with the project.
3. Always keep rubber gloves near you while applying stain to a floor or you may end up using a grocery bag covered with your own socks.
4. Never begin a big project without having the proper marriage counseling sessions scheduled for the following weeks.
5. Crying on unsealed wood only causes stains you will need to sand away later.
6. There is no Patron Saint of woodwork blunders.
7. Did I mention that the home improvement shows lie? They do!
8. Thank goodness for big area rugs.
