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.