pour améliorer: Transforming the Floor

We're really in unchartered territory here - for us at least. The floor at our house has been well-used, and not so well-loved over the years. It's made of Oregon, which is a soft timber, so every time anything heavy was dropped on it (or the previous tenant clip clopped around in her high heels), tiny dents were made in the floor. So, we had to do something to give it a bit more protection, and I certainly wasn't a big fan of the orange-ey colour of the existing stain.

Plus, when we opened up the little kitchen add-on it was clear that it had missed the original staining process, so if we wanted it to match the rest of the kitchen floor, we had to do something. You can see the difference in colour and finish in the bottom corner of this photo:

And a better view of the original kitchen add-on near me in this photo:

So, we decided in the last week or so that if we were going to do it, we should do it now, before we move back into the house. And true to form, we decided to do it ourselves. How hard can it be, right?

First step is hammering in all of the existing nails in the floor so that they don't stick out and rip up the sander when you go over them. This process took FOREVER, and I have a purple finger to show for it (no jokes about how bad my aim is please, the sheer volume of nails we hammered in inevitably meant I missed a few times).

Here I am hammering away one day after work. Yes, I'm so dedicated I didn't even change my clothes to do it.

Allie of course had to check that Tom was doing it right.

Once this was finally done (don't underestimate how long this takes), we were ready to start sanding.

Tom sprinkled kerosene around (according to this DIY video from Bunnings that's what you should do before sanding).

And then he got to work on the sander, starting with 40 grit sandpaper on the first sand, to get as much of the glossy finish off as possible.

He managed to get the kitchen and dining rooms sanded on Friday afternoon before our 6:30pm noise curfew hit.

And on Saturday morning the sanding continued...

Of course it was a stinking hot day, so we hooked up an extremely sophisticated cooling system...

Here's the freshly sanded kitchen add-on. You can hardly tell the difference between the stained and the unstained floorboards now, huh?

Daniel and Phil had the job of using little sanders to sand all of the edges of the rooms that the big sander couldn't reach.

It all became a bit much for Phil.

Allie pronounced him Dead on Arrival.

Here's a good view of the nail holes. These all had to be filled with putty once the heavy sanding was done.

So the boys started trying to decipher the instructions on the putty container.

And we all got to work. Just like the nail hammering, don't underestimate how time consuming this is!

Then the boys had to sand over the dried putty.

We ran out of time before our noise curfew on Saturday to sand all of the putty, so we had to finish that off on Sunday by hand (i.e. without any kind of machine).