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| rolling up the old carpet |
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| black, sticky tar under the tile |
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| we found tile and tar underneath |
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| Bill with 130-pound heavy-duty sander |
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| the finished product in our guest room |
Ever since we sanded, stained and added polyurethane to our living room and dining room floors nine years ago, Bill and I have wanted to do the same to our guest room and computer room. It is such a huge project that we kept finding reasons to put it off. But, last month was finally the time when we ran out of excuses. We tried rolling up the old blue carpet and and carpet pad without removing the bed frame. Don't ask why...it didn't work anyway.
When we finally got the carpet rolls out to the garbage we had a surprise. There was a long area that had old tile on the hardwood floors. After chipping all the tile off with a screw
driver and hammer, we still had a lot of tar. Bill called a friend of ours who is wintering in Florida and he suggested a product to use before we began the sanding process. It worked really well, but was very time-consuming. While Bill was on his hands and knees doing this, I repainted the room white.
For anyone who has never used a sander before, it makes a huge amount of dust that is so fine it filters throughout the whole house, in all the crevices. Bill had to use a mouth filter to keep it out of his lungs.
Next came the cleaning and vacuuming of the floors in both rooms. It seemed that no matter how many times we cleaned, there was still more wood dust to clean up. After awhile we just didn't care anymore and started with the natural staining. The stain had to be applied with a brush and then wiped off with a rag. So Bill was on his hands and knees again. When this dried, we applied three coats of polyurethane, waiting 8 hours between each coat. We finally got to cart the furniture back upstairs into the two rooms and admire our work.
For those of you who don't know, our house was once Charleston's airport office. All the rooms in the airport office had hardwood floors. We speculate that the section of tile was where a counter was located; and the tile area was a high traffic area in that room. The airport house was moved to it's present location in 1963 and set over a dug-out basement. Another bedroom, a larger kitchen and 2 more bathrooms were added to the main floor. Two bedrooms and a fourth bathroom were added to a second floor and a garage was added. I would like to find a picture of the original house with just the hardwood floors when it was used as an office building.
Bill is fond of saying that nothing is as easy as it seems at first. Of course, he was right again in this case. We took all the furniture and boxes of books, pictures, etc, and stored them in one of the rooms in the basement. It was during this time that our sewer system decided to get clogged with tree roots somewhere in the backyard. One evening Bill flushed a stool and heard gurgling in the tub the same time I heard gurgling in the garbage disposal. We went downstairs and water was pouring out of the ceiling over all the furniture and boxes and tubs we had stored in that very room!! Luckily it was shower water, because it was still warm. The plumber was able to come out the next day and clean out the clog in the backyard, but that was another huge job: using the shop-vac to get up the water, going through boxes to rewash clothes, throw away books and papers that got soaked, wipe down the furniture, etc.
This is an adventure that we might not want to repeat anytime too soon. But someday when Bill is gone, I am going to pull up the carpeting in our bedroom and see what the flooring underneath looks like. I may give him a few months to enjoy himself, though, and forget all the work he had to do with these rooms.
