H

Today is brought to you by the letter H:

H is for the Hiatus the Viovenge took; for Holidays and Houseguests and Hell broken loose.
Health, Heartache, and Higher education were also considerations. But now I am back with a (violet) vengeance, working on the floors again.

The stairs have turned out to be a dilemma. The two large steps are plywood, but the rest is OSB/Flakeboard/Horrible.  It's made of lots of little flakes of wood glued together.

 

 

Heres a closeup, its still covered with drywall muck, so its kinda hard to see.

 

I tried doing a pass with 80 grit and the palm sander. It cleaned up a lot, but the pieces of wood started flaking off, which in turn leaves holes that need to be sanded off. I'm afraid just sanding it is going to lead to these pieces wearing off as the stairs are walked on.

 

I've been researching how to paint this stuff, most people seem to recommend using an oil-based paint and primer on it so that moisture doesn't seep into the flakes and make them swell and peel. I hate oil-based stuff because I have to use yucky chemicals to clean it up, so I'm hoping I can find a way around. There will be much experimentation here.  

 

First step was to try putting DAP and wood filler over it. The wood filler seems to go on ok, but I'm not sure how durable it will be. The DAP was a huge pain, and since it's more expensive than the filler I'm going to ignore it. I'm also mad at the DAP because the hallway and bedroom are cracking in the seams I filled with it. I think I'm going back to Bondo, my first love.

 

I sanded down my test areas of each, and the woodfiller definitely seems like the winner. Now I'm going to try doing a whole stair with it and see it goes.

 

In the meantime, as I try to figure out what to do with the stairs, I decided to start work on the first half of the living room. This is a high cat-traffic area, so I'm going to try to do it in strips so that the carpet is easier to move, and I can focus on taking out staples to save paws.

 

 

Staple Removers

Time to start tearing out the carpet! I didn't realize that each step would be a different piece of carpet, but they're definitely coming off in chunks, which is awesome because I can work on them one by one without having to worry about anyone's paws stepping on errant staples or nails.

 

 

There are approximately eleventy billion staples to remove from each step. It looks like there was previously another type of padding on the stairs, which was removed, but the staples are still there, so I get double the staples.

 

Step one went great, step two revealed a problem. The wood is not plywood, its... gross. I'm not sure if I'll be able to sand it.

 

One emergency call to my father later, and we decided to continue removing and try to deal with the yuckwood as we go. I'm not sure if I'll be able to sand it, we don't know if it'll flake. It's going to be an adventure and may involve lots of filler.

 

Right now all but about four stairs are removed. The two crazyshaped ones in the center have normal plywood, which is heartening. Not sure what I'll be doing about the others though. The rest of the carpet will come off tomorrow in the light of day, and probably some from the living room too. Everyone knows staples are afraid of sunlight. EVERYONE.

Havishammery

Break's over. I decided to start on the stairs after my friend James suggested an excellent motif for them. I'm also going to try to do the living room floor, which will need to be split into two different sections because I have no place to put the furniture while I work. So its all going to be pushed from one side to the other. I keep forgetting to take before pictures, but here's one early in the moving.

This area is problematic because it opens into the dining/living room and the kitchen... and the hallway on the main floor. So I sort of expect dust to be everywhere.  Since everything was piled up in the corner, I decided to make use of old sheets over the furniture. Now it really looks like an old lady lives her. Its so Sunset Boulevard that I may have to go get ready for my close-up soon.

 

In an effort to reduce it a little bit, I hung dropclothes over the kitchen passthrough and the door.

Here's some befores of the stairs from upstairs, midstairs, and downstairs.

 

 

Also, only in my house does one find random wow cards UNDER a carpet. I blame the cats. 

Hallway update

I'm taking a break after finishing the bedroom in record time. While I was waiting for the poly to dry in the bedroom, I did manage to finish up the downstairs hallway. I hated the stupid, ugly orangeybrown door (seen below for reference). I didn't think I'd be able to paint it, because doors seem expensive to replace, but my father gave me the go-ahead after declaring the floors to be "more subtle in person."

 

 

 

I decided to continue the motif of the floor up the door, so I painted the mouldings to match the borders on the floor and used the same colours as I did on the floor. I was going for a sort of trompe l'oeil effect with the hallway continuing. The door gives a sort of weird forced perspective to the hallway. I really like how it looks now. Next step in this hallway is to paint the walls, which are really banged up and gross. It's not happening any time soon though, I'm on a break!

 

 

Before, During, and After

My room is complete! The floors are finished! Everything is moved in! Time to tell the facebookers!

 

 

 

 

Here's some pictures of how the room has changed. There's about a zillion more things in it than before I moved in, of course.

 

 

I don't miss the white walls (or ceiling) at all!

 

 

 

Moving Day!!!!!!!

I've been running around like Mrs. Frisby all day getting ready to move my stuff back into the bedroom. I got most of the closet filled up yesterday while the poly was still technically drying. It is not likely to ever be this clean again.

First order of business, hanging curtains. This immediately made the room wonderfully dark. Which is a pain for pictures, but generally my favourite thing about the redo.

 

Next up, the bed. I got help moving it this time, which was sooo much better than wrestling with it myself. The bed is way too big for this room, and I was hoping to move where it lives now that the wall heater is out, but for one reason or another none of the alternate configurations worked, so its going back where it was.

 

 

 

And the horrible mattress from hell got put in next. 

 

I spent the rest of the day moving stuff out of the living room and back into the bedroom. Tonight, we sleep in peace! Pharaoh is already readjusting to his new-old home

 

 

 I took photos from each corner of the room, because again... never be this clean again. My phone's camera doesn't like the dark though, even with the flash. I took these pictures around noon on a sunny day, with the lights on and the curtains of one window open...

 

 

 

 

In which I take decorating advice from a stone.

I woke up this morning singing Sympathy for the Devil, for no reason that I can remember (with the words changed to include my name, because I can). Somewhere around the time I was riding a tank and holding a general's rank, I realized that it's probably the only Rolling Stones song that I really like. As I was mentally planning my day and asking who killed the Kennedys, I realized there's another Stone's song that I'm OK with too, and it gave me direction for the day.

I see a beige door, and I want to paint it black.

 

I don't know why I choose stain for this. Really what I want is a nice black enamel. But stain+poly is what I have, so here's the first of 7 or so coats...

 

You can see the coverage isn't very good with one coat. Each coat takes about an hour to dry, which lets me move stuff into my closet while I wait. technically the poly is still drying, but can see light use. It's not supposed to be used for realz until 72 hours after the last coat.

 

And some more black...

 

 

I think I gave up taking pictures after this coat, but I did a few more. I'm sure there's a special spot in hell for girls who don't sand between coats. Dante probably didn't mention it because Beatrice was really into DIY and chilling there or something. At any rate, I didn't bother on this. I did sand it down once before the final coat to help get off some of the drips and weirdness.

 

Since the closets don't match the doors anymore, I decided to give them a coat for good measure too.

 

And here's some pictures of the room before I get the furniture into it.

 

Apparently Pharaoh snuck in and got a claw shedding into the wet poly. I can't get it out, its well covered, and will need to be sanded to be removed. I'm going to pretend it adds character.