The Floor is Done!!! (Part 2)

Has the suspense been killing you?

Probably not. You'd be pretty weird if you cared as much about our floor as I do.

Well... the third coat of gloss went on today (thanks to Tom's mammoth effort), so it's officially done!

So now it's gone from this:

To this after sanding:

To this (from a slightly different angle, but still looking diagonally towards the back wall of the house)!!!

Looks fantastic from that angle, huh?! If you ignore the well-and-truly stained and not-yet removed masking tape along the walls, and the fact that we have yet to get rid of that ikky yellow.

I've been having a crazy week at work this week, so Tom has been slaving away at finishing this on his own getting the floor done (with a bit of help from our respective brothers, Daniel and Phil). I still haven't actually seen it in person since the gloss coats went on, which almost seems sacrilegious!

Here's the process. I had grand plans for the floor to look something like this:

sourced from Euro Style Floors

Or this would have suited me fine:

sourced from Floor Installers

So we bought a dark chocolate coloured stain - called English Walnut by Solver. They actually mixed it with double the colouring so we wouldn't have to do more than one coat of the stain.

After preparing the floor we started staining.

I did a little happy dance as the first few strokes went on, as it looked exactly as I'd hoped.

The instructions were to let it sit for 15 minutes, and then wipe off the excess with a rag, which we did (most of the time).

Here's the whole living area floor stained (don't worry, we didn't start putting things on top of it until it had dried a bit).

Then we hit a snag. As it dried, it looked less and less like stained timber, and more and more like timber painted patchily with black paint. Not exactly the look we were going for. We don't know if we shouldn't have left it to dry for 15 minutes before wiping, or whether the double hit of paint in the stain made it too thick, or whether we applied too thick a coating, but not only did the entire stain take about three times the recommended drying time to actually dry (and even then you'd kind of stick to it a bit when you walked on it), it really did not look great.

So, with considerable disappointment, we reevaluated our options:
1) To sand it all off and start again (*groan*)
2) To give up and pay a professional to sort it out (*also groan*)
3) To try to sand it back lightly to take off the surface level of paint before applying gloss and hope it would turn out nicely.

We decided to go with option number 3. So Tom gave it a go with the floor sander with really fine sandpaper, but it started scraping it off badly, so that plan didn't work, and required a bit of a stain repair job. So... Tom returned the sander to the hire place and hired an orbital sander instead that was much better for this kind of application. And he got to work, as always.

We were a bit concerned about the result. It ended up looking pretty similar to this rustic-looking table.

sourced from Make Your House a Home

Not exactly the look we were going for when you compare it to this photo from above:

sourced from Euro Style Floors

But I figured that it did look interesting, and was hopeful that adding three coats of gloss would deepen it a bit and smooth out some of the inconsistencies. Plus I REEEEEALLY didn't want to explore options 1 or 2 from above.

So Tom applied the first coat of gloss on Tuesday afternoon, allowing it to dry overnight before applying the next coat yesterday morning, and the final coat yesterday afternoon after the required 8 hours of drying time.

Here's our  bedroom with the lovely glossy floor.

The view from the other angle. You can see the variations in colour a bit better here.

 

The view into the second bedroom:

And the view across the lounge room into the dining room again.

The gloss is amazingly thin. Tom let some of it sit and dry in his paint tray overnight, and when he peeled it away the next morning, this is what it looked like:

So that's it! the floor is done! And although it's not exactly what I wanted, I don't think it's half bad. It's certainly an amazing improvement on the orange-ey colour it was before! And hopefully that extra glossy finish will protect the soft floorboards from the rigours of real life, which is the most important thing, because they were ridiculously easy to dent.

Like the painting of our bedroom, this has been a relatively quick total transformation, although it doesn't really feel like it since we've practically lived and breathed the floor 24/7 for a week now. It's made a ginormous difference! Plus, we're now tantalisingly close to being able to move back in again!

Tom still needs to plumb in a makeshift kitchen sink for us so that even if we have no kitchen whatsoever we can still wash dishes, plumb in the wastes for said kitchen sink and the toilet, shower etc (which is going to be interesting since having slid the entire house forward the connection to the sewerage pipe is a little distance from the house itself now), put up a temporary fence for Allie, and tidy up any other loose ends we can think of.

Hooray for progress!