My ViewPoint
I’m refinishing my floors. I think they’re about 75 years old, and they’re original to the house. They’re yellow pine, likely milled not too far from here in the pineywoods ecological zone that begins at the north of our county.
Sad to say, they’ve seen their fair share of abuse, and even sadder is the number of times people have tried to cover them up. They’ve had two layers of varnish, one yellowish and one dark brown. Over the top of that was a coffee and cream paint, and over the top of that was a mint green paint.
On top of all that is the world’s most awful grey garage floor paint with sparkles in it. The people who bought our house were strapped for cash and trying to turn a profit. They fixed everything up in the cheapest way possible, slapped a fresh coat of paint on everything and skedaddled.
I’ve spent more time undoing what they did on my house than any other improvements. They made baseboards out of sheet rock. They didn’t bother to tear down the wood paneling they didn’t like. Instead, they covered it with drywall texture and painted it a sunny yellow. They hot-glued tile to the walls. But worst of all, they painted over yellow pine hardwoods with grey garage paint.
My first thought was to strip the paint. I bought some citrus stripper, to cut down on toxins and protect the environment. I have a hint for you all about why they sell the brands with all the toxins in them — it’s because they actually work. I wasted about $30 and several hours of my life scraping away at my eco-friend paint stripper and barely removed any paint at all.
My next thought, since the floors were so old, was that I was going to sand all the paint off by hand. The boards are a standard three quarters of an inch thick but thinner in some places. I thought if I had just one wrong move with the industrial sander, I would expose the tongue and groove joinery and ruin the floors. Maybe I’d even sand a hole in the floor completely! Our foundation type is pier and beam, so the only thing that is separating us from the ground outside is the yellow pine boards. There is no subfloor.
So I got out my orbital sander and I did the whole dining room this way. It took a month of my life, and the dining room is the smallest room in my house. I finished it with Minwax’s Ipswich Pine stain to bring out the natural pine, and it looked so beautiful. I was determined never to let anyone disrespect the yellow pine again. We finished it off with a gym floor epoxy, because let’s be honest, I have a lot of pets.
However, that was just one room. I still had a whole house to do, a full time job, and 10 million other things to do in a day.
“You’re being too careful,” my fiance said. “Let’s just rent the industrial sander.”
Because I was more sick of sanding than I was of making mistakes, I agreed. The morning we applied the industrial sander to the floor, it took off more paint in the first five minutes than I could do hand-sanding in an entire day. We finished the living room, our house’s biggest room, in a weekend.
The moral of this story? I guess it’s don’t be so afraid of failure that you hold yourself back from doing something that could benefit you.
Oh, and never, ever paint wood floors with garage paint.