How We Re-sanded the Sitting-room Floor and Still Managed to Save Our Marriage I (guest post by Ajlr)
A two-part story of effort, stoicism, and ultimate reward!
We started with good intentions. Our L-shaped sitting-room has a parquet floor which, for the last couple of years, we’d been promising ourselves we would get sanded and re-sealed. In fact our sitting-room was due a complete overhaul this year so we’d ordered new sofas and chair back in March for delivery in June, re-painted the ceiling and the walls (all bar the skirting-board, which would be done after the floor in case of impact with sanders). Sanding and resealing would be simple enough, we thought, having watched lots of video clips on YouTube and VideoJug about how to do it:
a) clear the space and cover against the inevitable dust anything that can’t be removed from the area
b) hire sanding machine and trundle it up and down till all marks are removed, using coarse sandpaper pads to remove marks, then finer, then finest of all to give a smooth finish
c) keep vacuuming so as to keep dust levels down
d) apply three coats of sealant/varnish
et voila!
e) admire your new floor!
That sounds straightforward enough, doesn’t it? We’re practical people, we could do this thing…
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S(anding)-Day minus 6: Sitting in my office, at work, I phoned the equipment hire people, explained what we wanted from their catalogue. This was a ‘finishing’ sander with a triangle of three rotating pads – in shape a bit like a giant men’s shaver, if you can imagine such a thing. So-called ‘belt’ sanders can grind too much off if you’re not used to them, apparently, and we didn’t want a ripple-effect floor! The chosen piece of equipment had a rubber skirt to keep the dust from flying too much, would cope with slight surface irregularities and go right up to the skirting-board, and looked altogether the Thinking Person’s Ideal Sander. The hire firm said fine, we’ll deliver it on the morning of S-Day, that will be [insert eye-watering sum] for the two days, please, to include delivery and as much sanding paper as we could possibly need. I should explain at this point that we were, as usual and for extraneous reasons that I won’t go into, cutting things a bit fine. (Does anyone ever do things well ahead of time, without mild panic induced by a looming deadline? If you answer ‘yes’ to this, I hate you! :) ).
We thought it would take two days to sand the (23 feet x 25 feet on the two longest sides of the ‘L’) floor, given our inexperience – well, my husband’s inexperience as I was proposing to leave the matter in his capable hands while I would be away at work for most of the time. So, S-Day, S-Day+1…and for the following day we’d had warning a couple of weeks previously that the local electricity company were intending to cut off all power in our area because of some major works needed. The power was due to be off from 9 am to 4 pm. We had therefore to make quite sure we’d finished using the sander by the end of S-Day+1…and the new sofas and chair were due to arrive on S-Day+7.
S-Day minus 4: I went out to get the varnish we’d need, for re-sealing the floor. Standing in the decorators’ store, looking at all the different varieties on offer, I knew a sudden craven impulse to develop a quick case of amnesia and book into a local hotel for two weeks under a false name. However, we’re tough people, we sanders, so I hitched up my cheque book and strolled nonchalantly over to the counter to point out the type of varnish I wanted. It was water-based rather than solvent-based so was the green choice as well as being lower in odour and quicker to dry. Only problem was, lots of other people wanted it too and there were only two tins in stock (we needed four, apparently, for our floor area). No problem, said the nice sales assistant, we’ll have our vans bring two more tins in from other branches and you can pick them all up on [S-Day minus 1]. That will be [insert another eye-watering sum], please. Yeah, OK. This stuff better change the world for the better, that’s all, as it implies on the tin…
S-Days minus 3 – 1: we cleared the sitting-room of everything we could possibly shift – and had room for elsewhere in a not-very-big bungalow. I leave to your fertile imaginations the emotional upheaval that this process produces alongside the physical one. We have something approaching 2,000 books in various sitting-room bookcases, large potted plants, too much sheer ‘stuff’ in various corners – ranging from a small wine-rack to an ancient valve radio my husband says is an historical artifact (I say it’s a spider haven par excellence), etc, etc. And that’s before you get to the big items like furniture…and the piano…and my mother’s 220-year old long-case clock… Oh yes – and my husband we forgot to go out and pick up the tins of varnish, which were left languishing in the store six miles away like a bevy of unwanted brides. Excuse me for a moment while I go and lie down in a darkened corner – even the remembrance of those two days brings on a nervous tic!
S-Day: it was one of those days when I had to leave the house at an ungodly early hour. The local sparrows were still tuning-up as my husband dropped me at the railway station so I could catch the first of that day’s series of trains. I bade him a fond, if slightly concerned, farewell and wished him the best of luck with everything. Four hours later I picked up a text on my phone: ‘the machine won’t sand closer to the skirting-board than two inches‘. Oh. Why? One hour later: ‘bloody machine won’t take all old polish off‘ followed shortly after by ‘did you know these wood blocks were laid unevenly?‘. My thoughts at this stage are best left undescribed, although the amnesia + local hotel idea was starting to recur with increasing allure… When I did, eventually, get home that evening I hugged my husband with fervour, slightly smudging his fetching patina of wood-dust and perspiration, and assured him that ‘we could do it’. I then went to look at the offending machine, where it was sulking in the corner of the sitting-room. I looked down at it, turned it over and looked at the underneath. Where was the dust-retaining rubber skirt? Where were the three rotating pads that were going to perform their magic on our tired floor? THE HIRE FIRM HAD DELIVERED A DIFFERENT MACHINE TO THE ONE I’D ORDERED! Oh woe and thrice woe, for we were undone, and we only had one day more before the power went off, to get the floor into its finished state for re-sealing.
Does that look to you as though it has three rotating heads and a rubber dust-containment skirt? No? Me neither!
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Coming in Part II – will the floor get done in time and will our protagonists retain their sanity and their will to live? Tune in to find out…
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