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.