Floors

(Steph writing)
So the floor has gone through a few phases since the beginning of this project. When we first bought the place, it was one of the nicest things about the original house:

But after fixing everything else up, the floor had taken a beating and was looking rough. The first thing that needed fixing was the old furnace grates. Now that we've installed a BRAND NEW HVAC SYSTEM (hooray! The irony is, we still don't have heat in the apartment we're actually living in downstairs), the old floor grates are useless.

So Steve bought some plain oak flooring and patched the holes up:

Rooney helped:

Then we rented a drum sander and edger for the week. We spent two full days digging through the stain to get down to the original oak. Here it is after 1 or 2 passes with the sander:

Keep in mind that controlling each sander is a very physical task. The edger is low to the ground and requires the operator to adopt a deep 'squat' position to use it. The drum sander is super-heavy and works sort of like a push lawn mower, except that it needs to be pulled up by the handles to make full contact with the floor. Since this requires arm strength (and height), Steve did the shoulder, back, and arm workout with the drum sander, while I worked out my legs on the edger. After twenty hours of sanding, we were struggling to get out of bed in the morning. Here it is looking better (can you spot the patch now where the floor grate used to be?):

Then we had to get into the corners and chisel out anything remaining, or sand it out by hand. That part wasn't so bad, at least we were sitting down!

Finally, it was time to varnish. Here I am painting on polyurethane:

And here I am, painting on more polyurethane. Lest I give you the impression that I did it all myself, I should mention that Steve works twice as fast as I do (on pretty much everything). So in the time it took me to do one bedroom and a quarter of the main room, he answered IT calls, took the dog for a run, took some pictures, and painted the second bedroom and 3/4 of the main room.

So, first coat is drying today, and this evening we have a hot date painting on a second coat. More pictures to come when it's all done.