How We Re-sanded the Sitting-room Floor and Still Managed to Save Our Marriage II (guest post by Ajlr)
Where were we? Oh yes, I remember…
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S-Day+1: the next morning, we were on the phone to the hire firm very early, querying with the manager (in a mild and civilised way, naturally) where the machine was that I’d seen in both online and printed catalogues and subsequently ordered? ‘Oh, there’s only two of those in the whole country’, I was informed. ‘We’ve given you the closest to it that we have here.’ I swear the phone handset almost melted in my hand, such was the fervour with which I grasped it and started to remind the maniac on the other end that we needed WHAT I’D ORDERED for good reason and what was he going to do about it? ‘You need an edging sander as well – we’ll drop one round this morning’ we were told. Hmm…
Later that afternoon I received a call from a slightly hysterical husband, to say that a helpful person from the hire company had been round with the edging sander and had spent some time commiserating about the problems with the other sander. He’d even done a demo, of how to get the best from the edging sander, how to open it up with the special key in order to change sanding pads easily. Great stuff. It was only after he’d gone that my husband realised he’d taken the key with him, when he went off to make another delivery quite a way away, and had no chance of getting it back to us before the end of the day…
S-Day+2: the day with no electrical power in the house. A day with no distractions – no internet, no radio, no other electrically-powered displacement activities possible at all, it would have been ideal (and in our plan) to be able to start on re-sealing the floor. Instead, the morning was made hideous by extended conversations with hire company people – who eventually offered us their exposed throats, no hire charges for as long as we wanted their machines, their assorted firstborn children – oh yes, and a hastily-delivered key to the edging sander. This was all very well, of course, but we were now running three days behind schedule, the work wasn’t finished, and the delivery of the new furniture was looming. Our conversations with each other were becoming slightly tetchy as we got tireder…
S-Day+3: final efforts were made with both sanding machines now that we had power back, but the results were not what we had anticipated or wanted. We had a floor surface that looked more mottled than magnificent, plus (from my husband) a tendency to sigh resignedly and address the machinery in terms that would make a Sergeant-Major blush. That evening, we stood looking at the results and decided that there was only one solution. We were going to send the machines back and go over most of the area by hand.
S-Day+4: in fact, this should really be called Hand&KneeDay, because those parts of the body rapidly turned out to be critical factors. We used my garden kneeler pad and a small pile of old towels to try and cushion the impact on knees, but with the sheer amount and energy of sanding needed there wasn’t much we could do to protect our hands. My fingers, wrists and forearms started to ache with increasing strength during the day and even my husband’s mighty thews were beginning to feel the strain. Rubbing off old varnish and marks with the coarse sanding paper, rubbing the blocks smooth again with the fine paper, we inched our way across the expanse of floor. Keeping the dust down was helped by use of micro-fibre cloths (used dry, so as not to raise the wood surface again) and we soon learned to test for the rather fitful breeze outside before shaking them out… Finally, as the light was going at about 9.00 pm, we backed wearily into the final corner and surveyed our work. The floor was never going to be pristine – it had, after all, had 60 years of wear – but it looked a heck of a lot better than it had that morning. Creaking faintly, and moving with great care, we crept off to have showers and a light snack before an early night. Tomorrow would be the day for the three coats of sealant – and as we’d have to shift some furniture to and fro to get to all areas, we would have to let an area dry from its final coat before lifting things carefully onto it in order to treat the rest of the floor.
S-Day+5 (aka H&K-Day+1): it’s not often you hear a grown woman scream – well, not on a fine peaceful Sunday morning in her own home, anyway. Such, however, was my strong inclination when I first tried to get back down on my knees that morning in order to start painting on sealant. Can someone explain to me why knees are designed the way they are? Why don’t we have built-in sponge pads on top of the bone, for example, eh? After the heavy wear of the previous day I seemed to have sadistic little knee-gnomes down there, smiting me with metal mallets as I whimpered my way across the seemingly endless acres of wood blocks. Why on earth had we started this – carpeting the entire space would have been much more sensible! My husband, meanwhile, in the stoical way he adopts on such occasions purely to annoy the hell out of me, was whistling to himself as he shuffled backwards across his side of the room. I wanted to know why the knee-gnomes weren’t focusing equally on him! Getting back into the all-fours position each time, after the couple of hours needed for successive coats to dry, I developed a far greater appreciation for what accidental martyrdom might involve! Anyway, we finished everything – eventually – including shifting the furniture, and sat propped up in the doorway in the evening dusk, leaning on each other gingerly in order to avoid being stuck that way by all the splashes of varnish adhering to our persons. This was the result, viewing along one side of the room:
S-Day+6: this was devoted to rubbing down (aughhh!) and painting the skirting board, laying the newly-cleaned rugs, dismantling piles of ‘stuff’…
S-Day+7: the new furniture looked great in the room, though the delivery men were obviously a little perturbed by our insistence on their lifting everything for even tiny distances rather than pushing a millimetre or so…
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From this experience we learned several things:
a) don’t believe everything is as simple as it looks in ‘how-to’ video-clips
b) parquet flooring, due to the nature of small wooden blocks necessarily laid individually, might look as even overall as long smooth floor-boards – but it won’t be
c) don’t believe that hire companies will deliver exactly what you book
d) don’t believe the coverage figures on tins of (very expensive) floor sealant – we had about half left over and I’m thinking of setting up a new bank, using the remaining two tins as capital
e) never shake out a dusting cloth upwind of an irritated and sweaty spouse
f) screaming and laughing alternately enables one to carry on working longer than would seem possible, even though you may have to make up some elaborate stories later on to reassure concerned neighbours.
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