Moar Filler

When I first started refinishing the floors, my father informed me that "Plywood is ugly." This turned out to be a bit of understated wisdom. Plywood IS ugly. Even after multiple sandings, it's full of nicks and knots and pits and uneven patches. I found in the clown room that it is almost impossible to spot fill all of these tiny crevices.

 

So, I'm going back to what I used to spot fill in the clown room, but using it all over the floor (which, surprisingly, is the intended use for this product.) This is the product I used, though this time I went with Red Oak instead of White. I like to keep things multi-culti in this house.

 

 

 

I used a putty knife to trowel the stuff all over the floor, to make sure that it gets into all the gaps. Once its dried I'll sand it down and then should be ready to paint! 

 

 

Because it is impossible to enter or leave the house without traversing this hallway, I'm doing this in two stages, with the stairs in the middle. This was working fine until I finished the second section and realised that I had blocked off one of the cat's access to the litter boxes. So now I have to keep him entertained for an hour while it dries. Especially since he has a bad habit of trying to lick everything he sees and I bet this stuff tastes BAAAD. 

Dat Dap

So the week has been full of sanding. I did two passes with the 80 grit because I feel like the clown room floor had more bumps because I spent less time with the lower grits. Then I followed with a relatively fast pass with 120 grit.

Now it's time to fill the cracks. Without fill, the floor has big gaps and holes that I can't fill with paint, no matter how much latex is in it.

 

This time around I decided to try a product my dad recommended for filling the cracks. I've still got Bondo, and I'm a fan of it, but its a two step process and it dries really fast, so it can be a pain. Plus it makes me lightheaded after a few minutes. So this time I'm trying DAP Plastic Wood.

 

 

The fumes from this stuff are only slightly less toxic-seeming than the Bondo, but it does go longer before drying and becoming unusable. I started at the end of the hallway filling in everything I could, but it became clear that I was going to run out way before I was done, so I got more conservative and started using it only in the larger cracks and holes. I went through an entire can, and there are still spots that need fill.

 

Once the goo had dried, I sanded it down. It seems to be working pretty well for the larger cracks, but it's not as good at filling in the smaller pits that the wood filler I used before was. I think I'm going to do another pass with it.

 

 

Overall, I liked the Plastic Wood, if it doesn't turn out to crack after a while, I think it'll be my go to for filling the seams and big gaps. Hopefully it paints well, because it's easier to use than the Bondo was.

 

 

Valspar is made of lies

I went to Lowe's this morning to have my paint mixed up. I wasn't 100% sure of the colors, but I had mostly decided. I was going to get a sample of one other black color to try with the super dark purple.

Lowe's, however informed me that they couldn't mix the paint in the Porch and Floor paint I was after. This is especially weird, because their literature claims the porch paint can be tinted to ANY Valspar color. Not "some" or "most." It says "ANY" color, and that was why I had decided to go with Valspar for this project.

 

If you watch television at all, you've probably seen a hundred Lowe's commercials lately advertising their ability to color match to any color. Apparently this is also a lie. I'm seriously irked at both Lowe's and Valspar that I spent a bunch of money on samples, when they can't even make the paint.

 

I contacted Valspar via phone and was told that the porch paint only comes in certain pre-fab colors, which is clearly not the case, because I had previously had custom colors mixed from their normal catalog. Even the label on the Porch & Floor paint says its available in custom colors.

 

 

The only reason I have been going to Lowe's at all over the course of this project was because I was buying the paint there, so the false claim of getting any color mixed seriously irksome. Pharaoh informs me from his study of daytime court shows that this is a case of detrimental reliance. He's on the job, lawyering for me. Supposedly they're going to reimburse me for the samples I purchased, but we'll see how that goes.

 

On the bright side, I took the paint chip for the colors I wanted to Home Despot, they ran them through their system and they say they can match them in Behr Porch Paint. So if I decide I really want these colors, I'm not out of options. I'm going to take the weekend to decide.

 

How embarrassing for Valspar that their competitor will make one of their colors when they themselves can't. I won't be using any more Valspar products again if they can't find a way to make good on this.

 

I suppose its just as well. Last night I left the sample board on the floor, and the cats took the opportunity to demonstrate which colors show dusty pawprints the most.

 

 

 

Still, fuck you, Lowes and Valspar for making me waste my time picking a color and driving back and forth!

 

 



Stained

I don't really like stain. It manages to be both sticky and oily at the same time, and the colour selections tend to be the same ugly neutrals that I could find at the Clinque counter.

It wasn't really on my radar for the bathroom until my friend Heather came over last week and mentioned that I could probably stain my doors to match the vanity. I hate the ugly doors enough that this seemed like a good idea. I had tossed around the idea of painting the back of the door bright orange, to match the accessories in this room. My mother, though, expressed her displeasure at the orange in the bathroom by asking what I was going to do when I wanted to change it, so I think painting the door may have induced a heart attack.

Here's the original color. All of the doors in the house are identical to this one, and I think they're all repulsive.

So while my many purple paint patches dried, I decided to try to stain the doors in the Halloween Bathroom.

The vanity has definite grey and brown tones in it (they call it a "driftwood finish", and I like thinking that the vanity is some sort of post-tsunami debris that washed up full of fish and Godzilla scales.)

 

I picked Varathane's Weathered Grey stain, which seems approximately the right colour. I went back and forth about getting one with poly already in it or not, and wound up deciding to go with the straight stain so that it wasn't glossy. This was probably a mistake, but I did save $5! hooray!

I've done two coats of the stain so far, and It's coming out nicer on the closet door than it is on the door to the room. I think it's going to need another coat, but I'm letting it dry out for a while first. The colour is slightly bluer than the vanity, but I think it'll look fine once it has had a chance to dry.

 

An added non-bonus to stain is the drippiness. I'm currently as spotted as my cat. and look like I might have some sort of disease. I'm OK with this, because my childhood taught me that if you have spots, you can live in the zoo.

 



 

 

Indecision

Now that the sanding is well under way, I'm working on picking out the colours and pattern to paint on the hallway floor. Right now, I'm conflicted about the whole thing. The only thing I know for sure is that I'd like to carry some of the bright purple from the outside of the house into the entry way.

The pattern is the first difficulty. I'm looking at two different stencil styles right now, this moroccan-inspired pattern, and this trellis thing. I'm mostly decided on the Moroccan one, but that may change by tomorrow.

I'm also torn on the colors (swatches below, keep in mind they read darker and bluer on my phone, links to the web pages for the colours below too). I'm trying to decide between three combinations.

1. Chimney Smoke (dark grey) or Corduroy Black (darker grey), Twilight Purple (darkdark purple) and tiny dots of Spirit Blue (bright purple)
2. Twlight Purple (dark purple) and Spirit Blue (Bright Purple)
3. Chimney Smoke (Dark Grey) and Oatlands Violet (medium purple)

Please feel free to provide your votes so I can ignore them and/or pretend it was all your idea!

Update:

I took a trip to Lowe's this morning. It turns out their database was down, which caused a big delay, but I wound up coming home with some samples, which I painted on a piece of plywood that I had in the garage.

 

I let it dry, then I painted stripes on each colour just so I could see how they looked together. No, I'm not going to paint the floor plaid. 

 

And here's the colours in natural light, against the house. Again, my phone is making everything way more blue than it should be, the house is a very purpleyviolet.

 

 

I decided I like the dark purple a lot, and I think I'm going to do the pattern on top in silver, but I'm not wild about the dark grey with it. They're both too cool toned I think. So now I'm looking at using a brown for the border instead. The bad thing about the purple is that it needs a primer or something else underneath it, because its thin and shows the grain badly.

 

This is a picture against the walls. I think tomorrow I'll pick a brown and just go with it. 

 



Roulette

My friend Ken and I play a game. We call it Britney Roulette. Its origins are shrouded in mystery, but had something to do with our mutual abhorrence/adoration of Kevin Federline. This lead us to exchange Britney-related holiday gifts for years, and somehow Britney Roulette was born. The rules are simple: load a Britney Spears album into your preferred MP3 playing device. Put it on random. Pray.

When Britney comes up (and she always comes up) you lose Britney Roulette. For me, this always happens at the most embarrassing moments.... When I've got punk music turned up to 11 in my car with the windows down... When I'm talking in vent in a raid group... Well, whenever there's any witnesses, random is almost guaranteed to decide that "Oops I Did It Again" is the way to go.

I tell you this, because I want you to understand that today's sanding session ended when I was reloading my sandpaper and lost Britney Roulette and had to go turn off my Ipod. It seemed like a good time to take a shower.

It's pretty easy to see the difference of the sanded vs non-sanded area with the 80 grit. You can see it takes off a lot of the gacky drywall, and generates a ton of gross red dust.

 

Meet my crew

Today I did the first pass with 80 grit sand paper on the first section of hallway. I'm going to try to do two passes with the 80 grit, hopefully this will help with getting out the bigger imperfections. I only did one through the clown room, and there are still some spots in there I'm not thrilled with. This is likely to take me about 3-4 days to finish completely.

Sanding is pretty boring. The sanders are mostly too loud for me to listen to music or watch TV while I'm sanding, so I spend a lot of time talking to my tools. I decided it was time for you to meet them. Hipstamatic photos, for style points.

This is Nurse Stanley. You've probably already met him. He was shiny and new when I worked on the clown room, but he's since acquired a fine patina of dust that would make any librarian proud.

 

 

This is Betrand, the Belt Sander. I believe he may actually be older than I am. He's a fine craftsman by day. He enjoys long walks on the beach and racing. At night, he dons 40 grit and attacks the faces of evildoers. 

 

 

This is Springy, the palm sander. He's smaller and easier to use than Bertrand, so I tend to use him more, though it takes longer. He's also necessary for getting closer to the walls and into the closets, where it's almost impossible to use the belt sander. Sometimes I have to supplement his work with some hand sanding, but overall he's my favourite. 

 

 

This is the supply wall. Normally there are photos hanging from these hooks, but it seemed like a good place to keep all the sand paper and masks for the moment.