Yowza, it’s been a while since we updated with a project. It’s been so long, in fact, that we’re now in a completely different season. (Uhh…when did winter happen??) We’ve always been pretty awful at updating regularly, but the biggest reason we’ve been super sporadic lately is because we’ve both been working more. I started a new gig, and Bradley’s taken on some freelance projects. Plus we’re still working on the house every weekend.
We might not update 2 or 3 times a week anymore, but rest assured, we’re still working away. Check out what we did a couple of weeks ago:
Boom. We painted our dining room floors white. Here’s what they looked like before, for comparison:
And here’s what the same corner looked like a year ago:
We love the black upstairs, but the rooms on the first floor tend to be a bit on the dark side. We decided to go with white to brighten things up. The entire first floor will have white floors, and the second floor will have glossy black. To tie the two floors together and make everything flow seamlessly, we’re going to do a two-tone staircase. Here’s what we’re thinking:
We’ll paint the treads black, and toekick area white. Easy peasy.
We went to our supplier in Brooklyn to pick up a 5 gallon bucket of oil-based glossy white paint:
It didn’t look so white when we opened up the can:
But that was quickly remedied by mixing the paint with a drill outfitted with a mixing attachment:
Mmmph. If that image doesn’t make you crave a latte, you don’t know what’s what.
We followed the same process as when we painted the floors upstairs (you can read all about it here). Our first coat was a mix of 50% paint and 50% paint thinner to encourage the paint to soak into the wood rather than sit on top of it.
Our paint guy told us to do this and we highly recommend it for anyone painting soft pine floors. It helps make the wood harder — less likely to gouge under, say, the claws of an easily excitable 2-year-old doofus:
It doesn’t look like much, but that first coat makes all the difference:
The second coat — undiluted oil paint — went on after a light sanding:
We gave the floor one last sanding and then gave it another coat of undiluted oil paint:
We still need to paint the black metal under the stove, but we won’t get to that for a while. Regardless, we love how it turned out. The dining room’s always been the darkest in the house. The brick wall and rafters make it so much worse. With the white floors, the room feels super bright, even at night with dim mood lighting. We also dig how it adds a crisp, clean feel to a room that has a lot of industrial, raw and gritty elements.
It has all the character and charm you’d expect from 130-year-old floors but it looks a lot less grimy.
While we had the paint can open, we went ahead and took care of a couple of projects we’ve been waiting on for a while. This is some sliding door hardware we snagged from an old building:
The hardware would have ended up in a landfill, but instead, it ended up in our garage. What can we say — reclaimed stuff is our jam. Now that we’re almost done with the dining room, we pulled out the hardware to prep it for installation.
We started by scarping off the remnants of brown paint. Here’s how it looked after a little elbow grease:
And then we gave it a coat of oil-based white paint. We don’t have after pictures yet because we have to give the hardware at least 2 more coats of paint.
We have plans for that sucker. It needs another coat and then we’ll share a really fun, really cheap DIY project that anyone can do. Super geeked about that one!
Remember this dorktastic magazine Bradley scored at a thrift shop a few months ago?
He matted and put it in one of the frames we made. We haven’t figured out where we’ll hang it yet, but it’s done…3 months after we started. Whee! Gotta love home renovation timelines!
Hope you dig what we’ve done with our dining room floors. We’ll be back to share some built-in cabinets we’ve been working on for the past couple of weekends. Stay tuned!
First things first: to the lady who commented and said that Bradley’s hot…I know, right?? He’s also really nice, really funny and really smart. I’m a big fan of that guy. Especially when he does stuff like this and lets me put it on the internet for everyone to see:
Heh heh. What a guy.
Things are starting to cool down in our neck of the woods. We built our first fire of the season recently:
This year, we’re determined to use our wood-burning stove for heat 90% of the time. We had our oil boiler topped off last winter, but we hate using oil for heat. A few weekends ago, we had two cords of wood delivered and we spent two full days stacking wood. I didn’t take any photos of that because I had the flu and really just wanted to curl up and nap all day.
We know the living room is going to be insanely cold this winter — no insulation, remember? — and it’s the room we spend most of our time in. We won’t get around to insulating it this year, which means we’ll freeze our fannies off if we hang out in there too long.
Now that the dining room is fully insulated, complete with new door and new windows, it makes sense to move the couch and TV in there for the winter. For those of you keeping track at home, this is our third living-room-to-dining-room migration in 18 months. Sigh. Someday, the madness will end. But not today, peeps. Not. Today.
Before we move in, we want to paint the floors and put up trim to finish up the room. But before we can do that, we have to address some issues with our dining room floors.
The floors are old and weathered, but we love the way they look. What we don’t love is how much they bounce, creak and groan when you walk around. Bradley’s mom summed it up: “You could never sneak up on anyone in this house.” We’re pretty used to creaking wood floors from years of living in pre-war apartment buildings. It’s the bouncing that freaks us out.
The bounce in the center of the dining room was so bad that it felt like you were inside a bouncey castle. Or on a trampoline. OK, fine, we’re totally exaggerating, but it was pretty bad. Last winter, Bradley built a wall in the basement so we could store our firewood in one corner:
That wall happens to be right under the dining room, and as soon as it was in place the bouncing stopped. Now we just had to worry about the creaking.
In our case, the creaking was due to wobbly boards. The solution was to nail them down so they stop shifting around.
We used these special nails that have a corkscrew twist through the body. This helps keep nails from popping up and also makes it really hard to pull them out once they’re in place.
We started by snapping some chalk lines along every beam that runs under the flooring:
Finding the beams was easier than it sounds: the butt end of each board has to rest on top of a beam. So we snapped a line down the center of areas where a lot of butt ends met up. Pretty soon, we had a series of parallel lines at fairly regular intervals:
Then we just went in and bang 2 nails per board all the way down the line.
The nail heads are totally visible, but they form nice, straight lines down the length of the room. This is not going to be the right solution for every creaky floor. It would look pretty odd in a new house with shiny new floors. But it works for our old house because the floors are already distressed and rustic. Visible nail heads just adds to the charm.
We nailed down the floor boards in the hallway while we were at it:
And we’ll do the same in the living room once we’ve moved all the furniture out.
There were some crusty, rotten strips of wood in the doorway that connects the living room and dining room, so Bradley removed them and replaced them with new strips of wood:
The process was exactly the same as what we did in the guest bedroom close way back in May 2011. You can read all about that here.
While he took care of that, I put up all the switch plates and outlet covers:
It’s been hard to photograph the color of the walls accurately, but you can really see it now that the outlets are in place.
It’s starting to look finished, but we have a lot of small details to take care of before we’re done. Like installing our new doorbell:
We don’t have any good before pictures of our old doorbell because we ripped that sucker out and stomped on it, Office Space style. You can see it in this picture from earlier in the year:
It was a beige monstrosity straight out of 1975 and they didn’t even bother to center it. We replaced it with this bell that looks like a teeny-weeny version of something that might hang in a middle school classroom:
We centered it, of course. But we’re not 100% happy with it. We might paint it white so it’s not so shiny.
It looks fine during the day, but it’s hanging so close to the track lighting that it blinds us at night. A crisp white will help it blend in a bit and hopefully keep us from burning out our retinas every time we walk through the room.
We painting the floors this weekend, and we can’t wait to share that with you guys. We also have some more updates on what we’ve been up to for the past couple of weekends. Plus we have to share our plans for the laundry room, downstairs bathroom and kitchen. Stay tuned!
The last time we really talked about our living room was way back in August 2011. It’s gone through a lot of changes since then:
The living room was our makeshift bedroom until we could get the guest bedroom and office renovated.
After we moved upstairs, the living room became a storage room. We closed the door and pretended the mess didn’t exist.
Then we started construction on our dining room — which was being used as a makeshift living room — so we cleared out the living room and moved the couch & TV in there. That’s how it’s been for a few months ago.
Despite going through a lot of functional changes, the living room looks exactly the same as it did on the day we moved in. We’ve been trying to stick to our one-room-at-a-time rule so we don’t have construction messes all over the place, so up until Saturday morning this is how the living room looked:
Burgundy carpet. We’ve lived with this for 15 months, people. And we’ve survived to tell the tale.
This room and the adjoining hallway are the last two burgundy carpet strongholds, and we decided Saturday would be a good day to attack them. We’ve ripped out so much hideous carpet in this house that we’re basically experts. In fact, Bradley moves so fast when ripping that I can’t even get a decent photograph. Check it:
Step one: use a boxcutter to cut through the carpet from one end of the room to the other.
Step two: peek underneath carpet and gag.
Step three: cut along the wall if necessary (sometimes carpet is under the floor trim).
Step four: yank.
Step five: roll.
Step six: keep rolling while holding breath so as not to gag from the smell that comes up from underneath the carpet. (Kind of a mix of the subway, grandma’s attic and sour milk.)
Step seven: play Guess the Stain™ — fun for the whole family!
After that, it’s just a matter of rolling up the foam pad that sits under the carpet and yanking out 10 billion staples. While I yanked staples, Bradley removed the linoleum tiles from the main entrance.
Linoleum is typically glued to a baseboard which is either stapled or glued (or sometimes both) to the wood floor. We were really, really hoping for no glue. Glue would mean an increased risk of damaging the floors underneath and a lot more effort when we have to sand.
It definitely felt glued down. There was a lot of prying, groaning, cursing and more prying. And finally the baseboard came up enough for us to peek underneath:
The good news: no glue!
The bad news: someone went way overboard with the stapler. There were at least — and we’re not exaggerating at all here — a bajillion staples holding the baseboard to the floor. It took a solid hour to pry just that little bit up, and we had to break for lunch in the middle because it was so exhausting.
Here’s how it looked after I yanked the staples out:
Still ugly. But at least the nasty-meets-grimy combination of burgundy carpet and cheap linoleum is outta there!
The floors need to be sanded and painted, but we won’t get around to that until we’ve completely renovated the dining room, living room and hallway. This is what we’re going to live with for a while:
We’re OK with that. The floors were painted chocolate brown at some point, so we’re not worried about splinters or anything. And cool wood feels so much better under our bare feet than carpet.
There is one last remnant of burgundy carpet that we haven’t removed yet:
This is, by far, the biggest radiator we have ever seen. It’s super wide and super heavy. We will eventually have to move it to get the carpet out, but we’re not really sure how we’ll do it. We have two plans so far:
Make 7 or 8 beefcake friends at the gym and conning them into helping us.
Leave the carpet and just build a radiator box to cover the whole damn thing.
For now, we’re just happy to see (nearly all of) the carpet gone.
When we moved into the house in April 2011, we were heartbroken to find soft pine floors under the carpet. Now, we love them and can’t imagine covering them up with new hardwood floors.
There’s something really warm and comforting about rustic, beat-up, old flooring. It feels cozy. And even more important, it feels right for our 130-year-old house.
We have more updates coming up, including a 101 on making frames. Stay tuned!
Greetings from rainy, grey Brooklyn! We just got in from rainy, grey Pennsylvania last night. We spent our rainy, grey weekend finishing up the insulation and drywall in the dining room. It was actually a two-weekend project. We started last week by installing some temporary fixtures to the dining room doorways:
The dining room is smack dab in the center of the house. Here’s a floor plan:
Even though we leave the windows and door open while we’re working, dust manages to find its way everywhere. We found ourselves dusting pretty much every day, especially in the kitchen. Dust even managed to get upstairs in the hallway and guest bedroom. How? No clue. But it was getting to be a bit much to keep up with. We found these tarp zippers at our local hardware store for $10 a pop:
Basically, they’re a zipper with a heavy-duty adhesive on one side. We stapled some plastic over the doorway leading to the hall and to the kitchen. Then we taped the plastic to the wall and floors to completely seal up the openings. After that, we taped the zipper to the plastic, unzipped it, cut a slit from top to bottom, and we have a plastic doorway:
It looks a bit like a Dexter kill room, but it works like a charm to keep the dust out. We did this for two doorways: the one leading upstairs and the one to the kitchen. We didn’t bother with the door that leads to the living room because dust wasn’t really getting in there to begin with.
Once we finished dust-proofing the doorways, we settled down for a nap on our ginormous radiator:
Not hammy enough? Here ya go:
We dragged the radiator out of the way and saw what was going on behind it:
All together now: ewwwwww…. Luckily that’s not mold we’re looking at. It’s crusty old wallpaper.
It’s the 7th or 8th different wallpaper pattern we’ve found in this house. We’ve lost track at this point. Either way, there was a whole lot of fugliness going on back there. And here’s what we found underneath the radiator:
A giant pile of dust and animal fur. Again: ewwwwww. That picture pretty much sums up why we’ve decided to make radiator boxes. We’re designing them to fit in with the overall look of our house and building them ourselves, so they’ll be more fancy-schmancy than the frumpy radiator boxes we’ve found in catalogs.
Speaking of frumpy, check out what the radiator did to the floor underneath:
We have a little patching and sanding to do. But first, we’re building walls. We started by removing all of the trim:
We talked about it a little in our last dining room post, but we’ve decided not to save and reinstall the old wood trim. The room feels so much more open without it. Once the trim was out, we built our walls.
This wall was, by far, the hardest:
Each rafter was slightly different, so the drywall had to be precisely cut to fit against the ceiling:
It was a bit like Tetris.
We were so geeked to tear down this old doorbell:
We’re guessing it was added in the ’60s or ’70s, and we’ve always hated the way it looks. So we’re replacing it with this:
It’s a small bell. Kind of a tiny version of the giant school bells that we had in our elementary schools. We haven’t installed it yet, but it’s going to look much more subtle than the giant creme-colored box it’s replacing.
Another thing we were super geeked about:
Saying buh-bye to that hideous floral wall border. We’ve been living with that ugliness for over a year now and covering it up was a happy-dance-around-the-room kind of momentous occasion. We may also have shouted “See you in hell, wallpaper!”
Check out our new, ugly-free walls. So fresh and so clean-clean! And so tall-tall, too:
To give some reference to the height of this room, Bradley’s just a bit over 5’10″. The room has always had taller-than-average ceilings, but we added about a foot when we exposed the rafters. With fresh, untextured drywall and no trim, the entire room feels so much bigger.
Here’s Bradley screwing in the last bit of drywall:
And, finally, here’s how the room looks now:
We love how the clean walls make the raw elements in the room pop. The rafters look so much better jutting out of a textureless wall:
And the spot where the rafters meet the brick looks so much better:
It’s finally starting to look more urban loft and a lot less country tacky.
We still have a lot of work to do before we can wrap this room up, though. We’re currently planning out how to replace the entry door:
It’s an old, solid wood door that would look great if we sanded and painted it, but we’re not going to keep it. It’s about half an inch thick and has the thinnest piece of single-pane glass known to mankind. Seriously. We might as well have a Kleenex separating us from the elements. This thing is doing nothing to keep us warm in the winter. So we’re shopping around for new doors. It’s not as easy as it sounds — all of the doors in our house are so old that they’re not standard-sized. Boo! Hiss! We might have to make or order custom exterior doors for the dining room and kitchen.
We have a lot of updates for you guys this week. We’re running in high gear right now so we’ll be posting more frequently. Whee! In our next post, we’re going to talk about our plans for the dining room doors:
There are two things that we think are incredibly difficult to shop for: 1) curtains and 2) rugs. We have a hard time agreeing on patterns and colors. Rugs are especially hard for us because our old house has big, oddly-shaped rooms that require big, oddly-shaped rugs. Total budget busters.
A few weeks ago, we went rug shopping for our office and hallway. Here’s what we got:
The curvy diamonds remind us of some Moroccan patterned rugs we’ve seen at West Elm and Pottery Barn. For a rug this size, we were expecting to pay $500ish, but we we paid half that price. Why? Because this is not a rug. It’s carpet.
We went to a carpet store and asked if they could custom cut a rug for us. We picked this pattern, and they cut it down to size and did a binding edge with a matching fabric. Viola! Custom rug in a non-standard size for $250.
The texture reminds us of jute rugs, but it’s super soft. And really easy to vacuum, which is huge for us since our dogs are shedding like crazy.
Speaking of which… In case you’re wondering how our painted floors are holding up to 2 dogs, check it out:
Our floors went from smooth-and-glossy to scratched pretty much the day after we brought Margot home in December.
We’re OK with it since painting was always a temporary solution. Just thought we’d throw it out there for any dog owners who are considering painting their soft wood floors. All the more reason to throw down some rugs.
We were a little worried that the patterned rug would clash with our patterned curtains, but we like how they look together:
As The Dude would say, “That rug really tied the room together.”
In other office news, we painted the trim and sealed up the brick wall.
Here’s how the brick looked before sealing:
The dry brick was shedding even more than our dogs. We’d dust in the morning and by the evening, there would be a thick layer of red and white chalk all over the furniture and floors. We couldn’t keep up with the vacuuming and dusting, so we decided to paint the wall with a clear coat of masonry sealer. Here’s what it looked like after one coat:
It looks much less dry and pasty. The red of the brick pops more, and — yay! — it’s not shedding anymore. We’re not sure if we’re going to do a second coat because the first did such a great job.
Here’s how our desk is looking these days:
New notepad from Anthropologie:
Recycled leather pen holder:
New printer — this is only living on the desk temporarily until we figure out a better place for it:
The black dresser is also temporarily in the office until we find a better spot for it:
We still need to make frames for our art. The prints are just leaning against the wall for now. It’s starting to look pretty finished, huh?
Also looking finished: our hallway. We fiiiinally painted the trim and threw down a runner so it’s officially done.
We ordered a custom runner from the same carpet shop. It didn’t photograph well because it’s still all curly from being rolled up. We were too excited about sharing it to wait.
This runner looks a lot like jute from a distance, but when you look closer, it’s a tan and light blue pattern:
The 2′x12′ runner was also $250. We couldn’t find any runners this long in stores, so we thought it was a totally fair price. We’ll post better pictures in a few days when the rug has uncurled itself. Stay tuned for that. We’ll be back soon with more updates!
We rolled on our second and third coats of floor paint this weekend, and we. are. done! Here’s how they look now:
So shiny! It’s hard to believe they used to look like this:
We’ve gotten a lot of emails & comments from people who are in the same boat — they were expecting hardwood floors and got ugly, old soft pine flooring instead. Our first word of advice: don’t panic! There’s hope. We’re going to share all the details of how we got our floors from gross-&-grungy to gorgeous. Remember that this is just what worked for us. It may or may not work the same for you.
It all starts with the right paint. Home Depot, Lowe’s and Cole’s (a local chain) suggested an oil-based primer followed by 3 coats of heavy-duty latex. The paint department employees at each of the 3 stores insisted that latex has come a long way and that the special (aka very expensive) floor paints are super durable. We were pretty skeptical, but decided to give it a show. We got a gallon of the recommended Benjamin Moore primer and paint to test out. Long story short: it sucked. And at $50 per can, that was an expensive lesson to learn. We’re still bitter.
So we decided to talk to a paint specialist instead. We went to a company in Brooklyn that sells only professional-grade paints, stains and other finishing products. These guys know their stuff. Here’s what they told us about painting soft pine floors:
Never, ever use latex on floors. Ever.
Oil-based paints are much more durable.
Make sure the floors are squeaky clean before painting.
We vacuumed twice, then used wet rags to scrub the floors. We tried using tack cloths, but they missed a lot of dust, left residue on the floors and made our fingers feel sticky. Wet rags worked just fine.
We want the paint to soak into the wood, not sit on top of the wood. Sooo…
Sand the floors really well to make them as porous as possible.
You can read about our floor-sanding adventure here.
Don’t use a primer.
Yup. This totally goes against everything we’ve ever been told about painting. But we want the color to soak into the wood — not the primer.
Thin out your first coat for maximum soakage.
Mix paint thinner into your oil-based paint to make it really runny. We did a ratio of 1/3 parts paint thinner to 2/3 paint and our first coat was very watery. Be careful not to splatter it on the walls. We have a little touch up to do in the guest bedroom from our overzealous rolling.
Roll a paper-thin coat.
This is a general rule for painting, but it’s extra important when painting floors. We don’t want any clumps or globs because they might peel up later. Our first coat was so thin, we were worried we that we thinned it out too much. That’s how we knew we were doing it right.
Lightly scuff the surface in between coats.
Don’t skip this step. It’s tedious and boring, but necessary. Glossy paint doesn’t stick to other glossy surfaces. Scuffing up the surface gives us a nice, rough surface for the paint to stick to. We used 320-grit sandpaper and an orbital sander.
Second and third coats: use full-strength oil-based paint.
Again, roll paper-thin coats and scuff up the surface in between coats. Depending on the paint and the floors, more coats might be necessary. Just keep scuffing and keep painting until the floors are covered.
Our paint guy also gave us a little insight about why you shouldn’t buy your floor paint at general hardware stores. The VOC content of oil-based paint is much higher than latex, and a lot of people are buying low-VOC paints these days. Hardware stores stock up on whatever is selling, so you might have to go to a specialty store to get a durable paint.
We picked up a 5-gallon bucket of glossy black oil-based for about $90. Compared to the $50-a-gallon Ben Moore latex paint, this is a serious bargain.
Time to get to work:
We used a paint mixer attachment for our drill to give the bucket a good mix. The attachment is metal so it’s reusable, and it costs about $8. After that, we poured a little paint into our rolling pan, added paint thinner, and gave it another whirl. Then we rolled it on.
Here’s how our first coat looked after it dried:
Not bad! It wasn’t textured at all and looked more like a stain than a paint.
We let the first coat dry for a full 2 weeks. This is definitely not a requirement, but we thought it might help the floors harden up a little more. Oil-based paints can take 3-4 weeks to reach full-strength. And, sure enough, after 2 weeks of curing, our floors were feeling way better. We tried scratching up the paint in the closet and in areas that will be covered with trim — it didn’t budge.
We also stomped around on the floors in sneakers and work boots to see how the floors held up.
We managed to make them super dirty, but the paint stayed put.
Next step: scuffing.
Not gonna lie: we panicked a little when we saw how much paint we scuffed off. The floors went from a glossy black to a very dull grey. And then we remembered that we have at least 2 more coats to throw down.
We vacuumed the floors and cleaned them with wet rags:
Then we rolled on the second coat:
This is where we started seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. The second coat rolled much more saturated than the first. We wanted a pure black — not a blue-black, but a black-black — and this paint did not disappoint. We were especially excited about painting the guest bedroom:
Those are the “old” floors and are in much rougher shape than the office floors.
With the second coat of paint, they were looking every bit as slick as the office flooring. Check out how the hallway looks with the black door at the end:
We were worried it would end up being too much black and the hallway would look really dark. The soft grey walls help keep things light, and we think the black floors and black doors look really old-school and sophisticated.
We let the second coat dry for 24 hours. This is how the guest bedroom looked the next morning:
And the office:
The floors were super glossy:
We think it adds a lot of dimension to the rooms. It also makes us want to hang our curtains, because we keep getting blinded by sunlight reflecting off the floors.
The best part is that the old floors still look like old floors. You can see cracks, imperfections and wood grain:
They have all the character you’d expect from 130-year-old floors without all the cracking, peeling and staining. You’ll never see that in new hardwood floors. So all you folks who emailed us about finding soft pine floors — embrace ‘em! They’ll make your house look and feel so much more unique.
We scuffed, vacuumed and mopped one more time, and then rolled on coat #3:
We’re going to let the final coat dry for at least a week before we go upstairs. And we’ll wait 3 weeks before we move any furniture upstairs.
A lot of people have warned us that black floors require constant cleaning, but we’re OK with that. We plan on throwing down some rugs, which will help. We also tend to hang out in socks or flip flops when we’re at home, so shoe grime isn’t a huge issue. We’ll just keep vacuuming and mopping like normal and deal with dusty footprints as they come.
And now for our favorite part of the whole project — the part where we realize how much money we saved!
Cost breakdown for painting our floors:
24-hour sander rental + sanding pads = $307.35
5 gallons of paint = $90 (we used less than half of the bucket, so we’ll count it as $45)
Sanding discs for orbital sander = $20
Paint rollers = $8
Grand total for 2 rooms + hallway = $380.35 Cost of buying hardwood flooring for 2 rooms + hallway = $3000 What we saved = $2619.65!
We’re seriously considering going to a bank to take out $2619.65 in pennies. Then we could fill up a room and swim around in money like Scrooge McDuck.
We should also mention that the estimated $3000 was for the absolute cheapest wood flooring we could find at Lumber Liquidators. And it doesn’t include tax. The total cost for buying wood floors for the entire house? $15,000. No thanks!
A few people have pointed out that we could have gone with an “engineered wood” flooring, but we’re not fans. No matter what HGTV says, fake wood floors never look or feel like the real thing to us. Either way, we’re guessing they would have cost more than 380 beans!
—
What we learned from our floor painting adventure:
This could take a while.
Painting floors — the right way — is a long process. Don’t go into it thinking it’s a quickie weekend project. It’ll end in tears. Speaking of tears…
Get knee pads.
They sell them at Home Depot in the same aisle as the the sanding pads….and now we know why. We’ve spent a lot of time on our knees the past few weekends. From scuffing the floors to scrubbing them clean, there was a lot of crawling going on. And, hoo boy, we are definitely feeling it now. So far, we’ve painting only about 1/4 of our entire house. We’ll be investing in some heavy-duty knee pads before we paint any more floors.
Oil-based paints will stank up your house.
Obviously this means you should wear a respirator while you paint. But it might also mean not staying in your house while the fumes clear up. We’re pretty lucky because we can hole up in the living room downstairs. We leave the doors closed all the time, so we never smell fumes in there. We also don’t have any bambinos running around to worry about. And, best of all, we leave for Brooklyn the day after we paint. By the time we get back, the fumes aren’t nearly as bad.
Floor paint isn’t forever.
While we love the look of our painted floors, we know this isn’t a permanent solution. We’re hoping to buy ourselves 5 years of use out of them. After that, if we have the funds, we’ll revisit the idea of installing hardwood floors. Or we could just sand and paint them all over again. We love the flexibility!
Bradley and I are total children of the ’80s, which means two things: 1) we grew up with some very embarrassing haircuts, and 2) Mr. Miyagi was a god. So when it came time to sand our floors, we cued up this YouTube clip and took notes:
Sanding floors, painting houses, defending against attacks from those dastardly Cobra Kai — home renovation is serious business. Now if only we could find a teenage boy we could con into renovating the house for us…
On Saturday morning, we marched on over to the Home Depot tool rental department and came back home with this puppy:
We had the option between a heavy-duty belt sander and a disc sander. We went with the disc sander. According to our Home Depot guy, the belt sander gets a better finish, but it’s harder to use. There was a definite potential of shaving too much off if we didn’t know what we were doing. We’ve never actually sanded floors before so we decided to play it safe. The disc sander still gets a nice finish and it’s way more user-friendly.
The Home Depot guy gave us a quick rundown on the proper way to use the machine. Here’s the right way:
Wear a respirator. Keep the sander close to your body so you can use your body weight to steer it. Keep the cord out of the sander’s way, and keep both hands on the handles at all times.
Here are some wrong ways to use a sander:
1. Do not ride the sander.
2. Do not Superman on the sander.
3. Do not surf on the sander.
4. Do not read a magazine while sanding.
5. Do not let pugs sand your floor. Not without a proper pug sander attachment, anyway.
And most importantly:
6. Do not attempt to sand your floors with anything other than a sander.
Now that we have that cleared up, it’s time to get on with the sanding. We started with a quick check to remove any staples or nails we might have missed:
Then we loaded up the sander with fresh 36-grit sandpaper:
The lowdown on sandpaper:
The lower the number, the rougher the paper.
The higher the number, the less gritty, so really high numbers will smooth and polish.
You can’t jump from a really gritty sandpaper to a really smooth sandpaper. You have to work your way up gradually to get a really even surface. So start with a lower-grit sandpaper, then go a little higher, then a little higher, and finish off with a high-grit sandpaper.
We started with 36-grit, then re-sanded with 40-grit, 80-grit and ended with a 120-grit. That means we had to sand each room 4 times total. And we had to do it in 24 hours. It sounds like a lot of work, but we were up for the challenge. After living with our crusty old floors for 5 months, we were feeling downright giddy:
We flipped the on switch and let ‘er rip:
We had at least 2 layers of paint to strip, but the 35-grit sandpaper ate right through it. We were initially a little nervous about getting too close to the walls, but the disc sander was great for getting right up to the edge:
The sandpaper is underneath the machine, so it didn’t hit our wall at all. We had to replace our sanding discs pretty frequently because the the paint gummed things up:
This isn’t something we planned for, so just a few hours after bringing the sander home, we were on our last set of discs. Oops! Bradley handed over the sander to me while he ran to Home Depot to get more. I was sweating bullets all day because I knew eventually I would have to SAND THE FLOOR! and I wasn’t sure I could do it.
The sander is big. And loud. I had visions of tripping and falling in front of it, and the 35-grit sandpaper eating up my face. Or worse — what if I lost control and the sander crashed through a wall? Or if I got stuck in one spot and it ate a hole through the floor? What if the “off” switch broke and I had to sand and sand forever?
I obviously watched too many sitcoms growing up because stuff like that only happens on TV. At the time, though, it all seemed very likely. But we only had 24 hours with our sander and I had no choice but to get over it. I took a deep breath, grabbed the handles, flipped the switch and started sanding. The verdict? It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. It was sort of like using a vacuum cleaner. A really big, heavy vacuum cleaner that vibrates and shakes the entire room. OK, fine, it wasn’t like using a vacuum cleaner at all. But it wasn’t horrifying. I still have a face and our floors are intact. So I call that a success.
We vacuumed after each round of sanding to check out our progress. The sander actually doesn’t kick up dust into the air at all, but it does leave some dust behind on the floor. Here’s how the guest bedroom looked after 40-grit:
Smooooth! When we first removed the carpet, we were so disappointed to find soft pine planks instead of a gorgeous hardwood, but the floors have really grown on us.
After the guest bedroom, we headed over to the office. This room was more of a challenge than the guest bedroom because it has hard pine flooring instead of soft pine. They’re harder to sand. There was also glue under the carpets, and those patches needed some serious work to sand off:
There was also this beast to deal with:
That radiator easily weighs 400 pounds. It’s massive. We thought we could just put it on the dolly and wheel it around, but that left gashes in the wood. To sand around it, we had to pick it up and waddle it over to the other side of the room. We went back and forth with it for 4 rounds of sanding. Still surprised neither of us ended up with a hernia from that.
Here’s how the office looked after sanding:
It was already dark by the time we finished, so we got to test out our new recessed lightbulbs:
It took us 3 trips to the hardware stores, but we finally found bulbs that sit really far back in the can and cast a nice light. The others all either sat out too far or looked too blue, so we returned them. We’re loving how the lighting adds instant drama to the room:
The little space right outside the office didn’t sand so well:
We went over it for what seemed like forever, but the paint never quite came off. We’re not sure if it’s just soaked really deeply into the wood, but we scuffed it so much that our paint will definitely stick to it.
By the time we finished all 4 rounds of sanding in the office and guest bedroom, it was 8PM. We still had the hallway to do, but we also didn’t want to piss off our neighbors. I did a quick check to see how loud we were being by running out to the yard and standing right in front of the fence that divides our property from our neighbor’s. Inside the house, it sounded like a tornado was happening upstairs. Outside, it was barely a hum. I had to strain to hear it. Looks like all our insulation and new windows helped soundproof the place as well as keep it warm!
We decided to keep going and finish up the hallway before going to bed:
We’d been sanding for over 9 hours by the time we finished, and we were wiped out. We didn’t bother cleaning up after we finished. On Sunday morning, we went back up to vacuum and take some daylight pictures:
And then we decided to go ahead and sand the dining room floors. Bradley spent part of Saturday prepping the room while I sanded. We weren’t sure whether we’d have time for the dining room, but we wanted to be ready just in case. Good thing, too, because we had 4 hours still left on the clock and that gave us plenty of time. Here’s what they looked like before Bradley prepped the room:
And here’s how they look now:
You can also take a peek at the afters in the “no” pictures above. My favorite:
I love the look on Jabba’s face in that one. Don’t feel sorry for her, peeps. That dog loves our shenanigans.
Coming up next:
We’re painting our floors! I’d better go brush up on Mr. Miyagi’s recommendations. Is it side-to-side? Or up-down? I forget. We’ll be back with more updates, so stay tuned.
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What we learned from our floor-sanding adventure:
Give yourself plenty of time.
Our Home Depot offers a 4-hour rental and a 24-hour rental. The 4-hour rental is $20 cheaper, but we’re pretty sure we couldn’t finish up even one room in that amount of time.
Buy more than you need.
We could have saved an emergency trip to Home Depot by stocking up and then returning all the unopened packs for a refund when we took the sander back. Luckily there are 2 of us here, so 1 person could sand while the other ran to Home Depot. And that brings us to the most important lesson we learned…
It takes two.
Having 2 people around was a major help in getting 3 rooms and a hallway sanded in less than 24 hours. One person could sand while the other prepped the next room. We also traded off sanding duties every couple of hours. That way our arms could rest up in between sanding sessions, but we still plugged along at the same pace. Plus, the sander was crazy-heavy. It definitely takes 2 people to haul that thing up and down stairs. Partner up, people! Now show me….SAND THE FLOOR!
A couple of weekends ago, we removed all the carpet from the staircase and did a happy dance about how great our staircase looked.
Yeah. Our definition of looks great! might need a slight adjustment, but we were still thrilled to see the burgundy carpet in our garbage pile garage. The next project at hand: removing the 5000+ staples on the staircase. And, since this falls under the early morning cavewoman work category, I decided to get it over with on Saturday.
To make my job a little easier, Bradley found this weird little tool at Lowe’s and picked it up for me:
It’s a tool for pulling out small nails.
The prongs weren’t quite small enough to fit under the skinny staples we have under our carpet, so Bradley used a grinder to thin out the ends a bit.
It worked like a charm! Way easier than the old stapler / pliers / blood / sweat / tears routine. The only real hazards of this job:
Little tufts of discarded carpet padding would staple themselves to the soles of my sneakers. Very, very dangerous: if I wasn’t careful, this could have annoyed me to death.
Halfway through the staple-removal, I called Bradley over and we decided to do something about this weird platform at the top of the staircase:
It looks like something that was added on, and we’re not quite sure why. In order to go from the bathroom (down the hall on the right) to the master bedroom (on the left), you have to step down and right back up on the platform. It feels clunky and unnecessary.
And don’t even get us started on this:
Just don’t. We could go on for days, and we have way too much work to do ’round here. It has to go.
Bradley grabbed a hammer and a prybar and peeked under one of the steps:
As we’d suspected, there was solid floor underneath. The platform was a later (and confusing) addition. So we happily subtracted it:
We plan on putting up drywall over all of this lathe & plaster stuff in the hallway, so a little crumbling wall didn’t faze us. With the platform removed, we instantly felt like the staircase looked better:
The only thing that’s bugging us now is how the bottom step leading to the hallway ends so abruptly:
But there are a ton of solutions we’ve already started discussing. We could simply continue the step all the way to the end. We could install a big built-in bookshelf that’s the exact depth of the staircase. We could do floating shelves from floor to ceiling.
The floor is totally solid (we did a jump test) and it was nice to see unpainted wood underneath. The plank flooring is actually not bad when you see it without chocolate brown paint and white splatters everywhere. We’re feeling a little less pouty about it these days.
We salvaged the planks from the platform and will use it to patch up the master bedroom floors when we get in there.
After the platform was out, I spent a few hours removing staples, and by the time I took the after pictures, the lighting was completely different:
The staircase looks like a totally different shade of brown at sunset.
With the staples and the tufts of padding gone, the staircase is starting to look less and less hideous. We still need to repair a few loose bars in the railing and secure some of the steps that have gotten wobbly over the years. After that, it’s time to sand and paint.
What we learned from this project:
Having the right tool for the job makes things way easier.
The last time I spent 5+ hours pulling carpet staples, my wrist ached for days. The $11 tool made a huge difference.
Pulling staples is tedious, boring work.
Our strategy? Throw on some Bob Marley, grab a beer and get to yankin’. We see lame jobs like this as an opportunity to turn our brains off and go on autopilot for a couple of hours. Sure, it’s not fun, but it’s not exactly work either.
Entryway staircase
clothed in burgundy carpet.
You make me vomit.
Lets send these old stairs
to live on a nice, big farm.
Pass the sledgehammer.
Burgundy carpet,
covered in crunchy plaster,
I will f#*k you up.
(That last one didn’t count as cursing because of the symbols.)
I’m having a raging case of writer’s block. The kind where you just sit and stare at the blank screen for an hour before giving up and doing something more productive. Like watching grass grow. Or picking your teeth. Or watching YouTube videos of a pug in a toilet. I thought a little haiku action would help get the words flowing, but the only thing my little exercise has done is remind me how much I hate our burgundy carpeted staircase.
The wood is promising. With a little sanding and a little painting, it could be a thing of beauty. But we’re having a hard time seeing past all the ugly right now.
Where there should be a fabulous old finial, there’s a crusty little glass bead.
Where there should be a gorgeous old world chandelier, there’s a shiny brass Home Depot light fixture.
With 3 burned-out light bulbs that we never changed because we’d rather just yank the whole thing out and toss it in the garbage.
One day after work, I decided I’d had enough. I gathered my ammunition and went into battle:
L to R: mini crowbar, pliers, chisel, screwdriver, gloves, coffee, iPhone.
I’m not sure why I grabbed the chisel and the iPhone. The screwdriver came in handy a few times, but mostly just for picking my nails. I am not a role model. Don’t do as I do, do as I say. Only don’t listen to anything I say because I have no idea what I’m talking about 78.3% of the time.
Luckily for me, Bradley came home from work at that exact moment. It was a nice change to have an assistant rather than being an assistant.
Especially when my assistant is a total cutie pie:
Hello, assistant,
will you take the carpet out
to the garbage pile?
Your warm, friendly smile
makes me want to pinch your cheeks.
The ones in your jeans.
If I turn up dead,
it’s because he has killed me
for that last haiku.
Still not sure why he puts up with me, but I’m glad I finally had a reason to use one of the hundreds of shots of his Levis-wearing hiney that I’ve snapped in the past 2 months. Bradley took the carpet out to the dumpster and our staircase suddenly looked a whole lot more naked:
I wouldn’t use the word fabulous just yet.
But at least it isn’t covered in burgundy carpet. Every little step towards a non-hideous home counts, people. Bully for us! We still have to yank out all of the staples and fix some wobbly steps before we can sand and paint. But we’re finally starting to see how pretty it could someday be.
One last haiku before I’m out:
I’m a designer.
I should stick to my day job
and not write bad poems.
We have two loos in our house: a full bath upstairs and a half bath downstairs. We haven’t shared any pictures of either one on the blog so far for 2 reasons:
We have a one room at a time rule (even though technically we’re working on 2 rooms and a hallways right now).
They’re so ugly that your eyeballs would pack up their bags and run away from home. We don’t want that on our conscience.
Still, we’re getting super close to finishing up our guest bedroom / Smurf room / hallway projects — we can practically smell the paint fumes already! — so there’s been a lot of talk about the other rooms we still have to work on. Especially the hideous porch-turned-laundry room and half-bath connected to our kitchen. Those two rooms combined are the bane of our existence right now, and our heads are swimming with ideas.
Here’s what the porch and bathroom floor plan looked like when we moved in:
And here’s a before of the laundry room:
As for the bathroom, imagine the ugliest, most shoddily-put-together bathroom you can think of. Well, ours is a step or two below that. Cheap linoleum tile. Boring, standard Lowe’s sink and cabinet. Oddly shaped single-pane window. Hideous green paneled walls. …with popcorn texture. In short: booooo! hiss!!
We seriously considered the slash-and-burn method of dealing with it, but we’re not sure setting fire to a part of your own house counts as DIY or renovating. And it definitely doesn’t count as sane or normal, so we’re going to skip the arson and and go with a new floorplan instead. Here’s what we have in mind:
The porch currently leads out to the back yard. This is one of 4 ways to get in and out of our house. It’s a bit excessive. We’re going to seal up the doorway to the outside because we need the wall space more than we need an exit.
We’re going to seal up the doorway to the bathroom and convert the laundry room door into an open doorway (love those!). This will give us more room for kitchen counters.
We’re going to re-open the doorway connecting the laundry room to the bathroom. You can see it in laundry room photo above — it’s the crusty white thing behind the dryer.
One of us (ahem) really wants pocket doors for the bathroom. It’s in the whining discussion stages right now.
We’re going to put a bathtub or shower in the bathroom. That’s right: we’re turning our half bath into a full bath. Raising property value, y’all!
We’re going to put a sink in the laundry room area, right outside the bathroom door. Yes, this means we’ll have to go outside the bathroom to wash your hands. We’re hoping this won’t be awkward for guests. Help us out, people — would it make you uncomfortable to have a sink right outside the bathroom rather than inside?
Another thing we’ve been talking about is having white floors in the laundry room / bathroom. The whole house is going to have black floors, but we’re going for a low-key beachy vibe. Something like this:
White paneled walls, light floors and the perfect blend of modern and antique. It’s half California, half Paris. Le swoon! And then there’s this bit of gorgeousness:
If I had a bathtub that warm and inviting, I would never get out. I’d be one giant prune 24 hours a day. A tub like that isn’t made for bathing — it’s made for soaking. Luxuriating. With bath salts as opposed to the Mr. Bubble we’re so accustomed to. We’d have to become the kind of people who keep bath salts in giant apothecary jars on our window sills. And buy fancy soaps that look too pretty to actually use. Hey, a girl can dream, right?
While we’re in love with the whole claw foot tub idea (and found several on Craigslist for under $100), we’re also thinking about doing something totally insane and unconventional. Keep an open mind and feast your eyes on this:
We love how they raised that shower up with blocks. It looks almost Japanese. And Bradley thinks it feels more complete with legs rather than just setting the tub on the ground. The look is a little bit country and a little bit rock & roll. But with a galvanized tub, we were thinking it might be a little too much on the country side for us. And that’s when we found this:
Ooh la la, that bathtub. When we saw it, we fanned our faces to keep from having a fainting spell. It’s super modern and super old-fashioned at the same time. We love how it’s black and white instead of galvanized. And can we please talk about the wood back rest? Mercy. In a very white bathroom with touches of black, we think it would look super elegant and totally swoon-worthy.
Our idea so far is to visit a farm supply store and buy a galvanized horse trough. We’d paint the outside and inside so the tub won’t rust, and we could make a really comfy back rest to help facilitate our hours-long soaking. And — best part — we could do all of this for under $200. A horse trough costs about $100. Paint and wood definitely won’t cost us $100, but we like to pad our estimates…just in case.
Right now, we’re in our daydream phases. Who knows? Our plan might changes a hundred times. We won’t get to these two rooms until after our next project: the master bedroom. So geeked about getting that one started. There’s something about sealing up doors and making new doorless entryways that gets us all worked up!
So what do you think? Does a painted galvanized tub sound like a good idea? How about that sink outside the bathroom? Do you prefer bath salts or Mr. Bubble? We’re dying to know!
