It's Been a Long Time

It's been a long time since Matt and I put the kids to bed and spent the evening working on the house, but that is exactly what we did this past week.

As I told you earlier, most professionals did not seem willing to help us with our flooring issues and while the plan is to totally replace our floors our budget doesn't exactly allow for that.  So, for now we are going to just put a band aid on in in the form of a little bit of stain and a little bit of poly.

Our dining room area is the worst of them all but it is also the pathway of our entire house (hence it has taken the hardest beating).  Our Entry door goes into the dining room, the entrance to your basement is in our dining room.  To get from into the living room from the upstairs, one must first pass through the dining room and you have to walk through the dining room to get to the kitchen.

Since we don't plan to move out of our house for a week to get this accomplished we have broken the project into three sections.  This past week we decided to do the area under our dining room table.

Step One:  Clean the Floor

 Step Two:  Take a chisel and scrape all of the paint that has dripped/splattered (from the previous owners NOT us) onto the floor.  This proved to be quite a tedious task and also created a bit of a mess so we soon decided that since this area would be under the rug that our dining room table sits on, maybe we didn't need to get ALL of the paint drips off the floor.

 Step Three:  Fill in all the scuff and scrape marks with the stain.  This also proved to be a tedious job.  Because the stain was not going to soak into the already finished floor, I took on the task of using a foam brush to dab stain on all the the scratched parts where the finish had come up to expose bare wood.  After letting the stain soak in, I had to use an old T-shirt to wipe up ALL of the excess stain or it would just have become a sticky mess on our floor.

 Step Four:  Protect all of our hard work.  Right before bed, Matt brushed on a coat of poly in hopes of preventing any future scrapes, scratches and bumps.  Being the good sport he is, he also got up at 5am the next morning to put on a second coat.

We are pretty happy with the end result but we still have to do this two more times.  The key is to space it out so that we will always have access to the areas that we need to get to.  The other key is to make sure that we get it accomplished in time that our dog and our toddler can walk on it and not complete damage all of our hard work.  In a house as busy as ours, it is very difficult to keep everyone from walking on the floors.

 

On a side note - Siberian Husky during prime shedding season and a coat of wet poly on a wood floor, not always a good match:)