xtcian

10/10/02 Hey kids, and welcome

10/10/02

Hey kids, and welcome to Ian's Boring Household Project Korner !!! Today we're discussing floors, and how much I hate working on them!!!

Wait, dont leave just yet!

So you walk into our farmhouse, right, and it's this amazing structure from 1815 except that every room was furnished and decorated in 1951 and left that way. Wall to wall early shag rugs in every room, replete with clocks, cherubs, wooden owls and everything else your Gramma had upstairs. I have a profound respect for Virginia Nelson, the previous owner of our farmhouse – she lived to be almost 90, and until her last days, she kept a garden that was the pride of the Berkshires. There's touches of her all over the place, including a small recipe book in one of the drawers (the contents of the house's drawers has not changed in forty years – we bought the place "as is") that says "this book is fifty-two years old!" as if she knew Tessa and I would be reveling in her things years later.

But her major undoing, her Waterloo, was floors. Apparently she along with the rest of America in the 1950s – considered wood floors to be somewhat declassé, and probably drafty to boot. So she hired men to nail-gun pieces of plywood on top of it (thousands of nails; a nail every two inches) and then glue-gunned carpet on top of that. For decades the real floors lay hidden, until Tessa and I came along to free them to their natural state.

I don't know how much of my small, disturbed readership has ever pulled 784 nails out of a floor with a cat's claw hammer, but let me warn you now: you'll be paralyzed for weeks. Today's nightmare concerned the living room, and once the floorboards were up, ancient paint from the years preceding Virginia (before 1948) was on the wood, lazily painted around a long-gone carpet (see pics). Now you have three choices lay down toxic Zip Strip on the floor and risk having kids with fourteen testicles; rent a drum sander and sand sideways with the coarsest grit they sell; or say "fuck this" and watch cable. I chose option two.

Then came the cherry stain (smelly, very smelly) and usually, two or three coats of tung oil. I had done this with three other rooms, but the living room was pissing me off. If you look at the picture, you can kinda tell where there used to be a closet and a load-bearing wall, and how they lay down a bunch of non-matching wood to make up for it. There's also the problem of painted wood, stained wood and bare wood all on the same floor. Bored yet? So was I. I'd pretty much lost patience with the whole forkin' thing.

Then I rallied and drum-sanded only the painted part, spread cherry stain over the whole damn thing (including the stained wood from 1929), and then, with a glorious "fuck it" heard all the way to Connecticut, wiped on HIGH GLOSS POLYURETHANE. I'm no fan of polyurethane I think it's cheating, it's bad for the environment, and made of shit that comes out the back of nuclear submarines. But this stuff is water-based, and dries in HALF an HOUR. I allowed myself to get complacent this time.

From there, the horrifying wallpaper tore off in easy sheets. We painted the room "linen" colored, and tonight, I'll be damned if the place doesn't look half bad!

above and below: the floor unfinished, then finished (from two angles)