varnishing floors

EMPTY/FULL

/ janpriddyoregon / 7 Comments
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“Spot” is a mostly-wild rabbit. The truly wild rabbits do not have a white spot on their heads and would never have come into the yard to eat montbrecia in the middle of the day.

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Two of the ravens. Two more are out of the hot in a snag, one was on the sand.

We saw five ravens during our walk the other day. The raven pair have been as successful raising their brood as the eagles. We are less confident about our bats. Two were living under the eaves and we waited before going out early one morning until the sky brightened enough to send them home. Since then, fireworks. Every night. Mostly we love summer as much as everyone, but fireworks. However, the out-of-state party that was blowing sparks right over our head the other night, might have left. We hope they are gone. We hope so, but we are resigned to one more night of explosions keeping us awake past 10.

We need our sleep.

IMG_4548We moved furniture back into the living room and for a few days, it was lovely on the newly varnished floor. Clear space, less furniture. But we are not done varnishing floors. Almost immediately, we started shifting to prepare for the next step. The coffee maker is on top of the dryer. The microwave is around the corner. We just now finished moving everything else out of the kitchen and dining room except the fridge (we’re saving that for tomorrow).

I store pantry items in glass jars. Coconut and dried garbanzos and five organic cooking oils—all of that. Most of those nine shelves are lined up on the floor of a bedroom. We managed to slide the huge bookcase that housed the pantry into the hall. The round dining table, pie safe, and a bookcase are in the living room. So is the Kitchen Queen and what was kept in those pieces of furniture now on tables and in cartons. A drawer of candles on the sofa.

It has only just occurred to me that since I am retired, I will never again need the serving pieces for chocolate pots de creme and sparkling cider served to my students. I do not need to save them or store them and, along with a great many other things, including my grandmothers’ crystal, I will be letting them go.

In the mean time, Gary is scrubbing the floor and I cannot find the paint to finish painting into the corner I could not quite cut into when all the furniture was in place. There are still too many books. Too much of everything. We will never burn all these candles. Chaos.

So what else is new?

 

FINISH

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments
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Gary vacuuming the floor for the second or third time before the fourth coat of varnish.

The plan was to put down a cheap floor and then after our sons graduated from college we would spring for hardwood.

A contractor suggested particleboard, sealed and oiled. The look was not what I was after. I chose A-face half-inch fir plywood. The A face is solid, with knots filled. It is not expensive—as best I can recall the four by eight sheets cost about $24 each in 1985. Fifty cents a square foot was about our speed.

A professional painter (the brother of an old friend) detailed a plan for finishing the floors. I wanted mostly wood showing but with a simple painted pattern. He suggested specific products and I followed his advice. I did a bedroom first with green zigzags, then the kitchen and dining room with an oversize black check, and finally the living room has dark purple zigzags. For each floor, I sealed the wood and then drew the pattern with a pencil and my grandfather’s steel rules. I painted the pattern with eggshell oil-based paint—on hands and knees—no painter’s tape but a steady hand. The varnish should have gone straight on after the paint cured, but the varnish was the most expensive step and I wanted some wear on the floor. Leaving the painted floors unvarnished allowed the softer parts of the grain to wear away with foot traffic. The grain becomes three dimensional. This is trendy today, but it was pretty much a unique look in the 80s.

Eventually I sealed the floors with the nasty clear varnish, three coats—two in the late 80s and a third in the 90s. The finish is hard but flexible enough for floors “with light use,” though my floors have always seen hard use, the tracks of children and dogs, sandy feet.

Yesterday I brushed on coat number four. Yeah, on my hands and knees with a four inch brush. It took an hour and my knees might be bruised.

Gary took me out for ice creams.

The stink was terrible in the house, but moving the furniture, books and CDs out of the space was probably the worst part of the process. Everything is crowded into spaces that were a bit crowded to begin with. The sofa is upended in front of the linen closet.

Before I could apply varnish, Gary vacuumed and scrubbed the floors once, I went over them, and then Gary went over them twice more. They show their age. Fir is a softwood and this floor has over thirty years of dents and dings and stains. We still prefer it to any replacement. In a week or two, we’ll put most everything back and clear the dining room and kitchen in order to put the last coat on those floors. Most people will not even notice a difference.

In the mean time, we’re sleeping in our younger son’s old room, two doors past the toxic varnish. We will avoid cooking—I will avoid cooking too much. We’d like to tear out the tile shower but scrubbing and scrubbing will have to do. For most of our marriage, we have made do with what was handy or free or could be done with least expense. And even now. But the ceilings and walls and floors all needed a definitive finish. Finishing. It’s an overwhelming task.

This is meant to be the last time. Once we complete the work we plan for this summer, I expect the walls and floors will do for the remainder of our lives—twenty years or so. If the tsunami doesn’t take this house first, our heirs will sell it or put down something else for people to walk upon.