Of Human Bondo-age

Today, the floor is more marked up than a chunky sorority pledge.  I've been sanding mostly at night, and the lighting isn't great for detail work. Today I decided to sand a bit while it was sunny, and found tons of holes and bad spots that need more sanding and filling. I like to mark these spots as I find them so I can go back and fill them, since the Bondo dries so quickly once its mixed.

 

Waiting for the Bondo to dry and sanding it is going to add another day, but it should help a lot with the final product. Every tiny pit tends to show once the paint is on. Hopefully after one more touch-up sanding I'll be ready to clean and paint. Curse the stupid sunshine for showing the flaws. I'm starting to feel like the floor is more patch than wood.

More stupid filler

So close to being done with the stairs! I wasn't totally wild about the way the filler had left the flakeboard, so after wrestling with myself, I finally decided to do another coat of it. I tried to convince myself that the texture would "add character", "add traction" and "add visual interest", but in reality its just driving me crazy. So even though I've been through crazy amounts of wood filler already, I'm adding another coat, which adds sanding. I had hoped to be done with the stairs to paint them this weekend, but it looks like there's another week of dust coming.

 

I did every other stairs so that I could still get up them when I was done. This was a lesson I learned from the first time, when I wound up leaving foot prints thanks to poor planning. 

In which the Violet Vengeance springs a leak

Forward progress has ground to a halt thanks to the Seattle weather. It turns out that the dark, moldy patch I found under the carpet is probably less a construction remnant and more a scary-moldy leak.

 

This seems to only happen when the wind is also enough to push the rain around, so we're hoping its a leak around the window. It happened again a few days later, when we got more liquid snow. I can't sand when the floor is wet, so we are currently experiencing a work stoppage.

 

My dad came up with the giant ladder and some gross caulking to seal around the window. We're crossing our fingers it works and we won't have to start bailing next time it rains. I don't really want to put down paint until I'm sure it'll be dry for a few days in a row, which at this rate will be sometime in July.

 

 

 

 

Patchwerk

I severely underestimated the amount of patching needed on the living room floor. So far I've been through two cans of DAP, a can and a half of Bondo, and five tubs of wood filler.

 

 

Every time I patch, I find more holes... rinse, repeat. I've been putting on the filler in patches, then sanding it, and repatching.

 

The supervisor of this project is simultaneously disappointed in the lack of progress, and the taste of Bondo. He has to be locked away when there is wet goo on the floor, because he tries to eat it. 

 

Slowly, slowly its coming together, getting smoother. At this point, about 2/3 of (this half of) the room is ready to be cleaned and painted. The stairs still need more Bondo and sanding too. I'm trying to time it so that everything can be painted at roughly the same time, but it feels like there are lots o' delays.

We have the technology

So it turns out that the stairs are not all flakeboard. Only about half of them are. This is awesome in that a few of the stairs are solid wood. It is not awesome in that the two odd-shaped stairs are the worst plywood I have unearthed so far.

 

Its tough to show how pitted and gross the wood really is, but some of the cracks went down about an eighth of an inch. At this point, it is not so much about filling as it is about rebuilding. I started by using DAP, but it didn't go very far.

 

The first two passes still left quite a few holes. This is definitely a multi stage process.

 

 

 

Then came the Bondo. It seems to do a little bit better on deeper holes because it doesn't shrink as much. I did the worst parts of these stairs, and wound up running out of Bondo.  Since I can't find it locally, I've been ordering from Amazon, so there was a bit of a delay on this. 

 

 

 

After three layers of Bondo, I covered the whole thing with wood filler and sanded some more. It's still not pretty, but at least most of the holes are filled. The edges are still really gross, but I'm hoping they don't show as much once everything is painted.

 



 

 

Furred Lines

I'm trying to make some decisions about the design on the room, so I can decided where to stop sanding. The north and south walls are both different lengths, with a weird alcove on the east side. This means the midpoint of each wall is slightly diffs by about four feet. There's no really good place to divide the area in half. I decided to put down two lengths of rope so that I could get an idea visually of where I might split the room.

 

As soon as I put them both down, Zulu showed a clear preference for one. In the absence of any real argument against this midpoint, I decided to go with it. Given the design ideas I'm kicking around for the living and dining areas, the visual midpoint will likely be this entire area.  Zulu continued to voice his support for this line throughout the evening. Eventually, he pulled out the other line. Done deal.

 

Yes, he's really that fat.

Catsup

Working on both the stairs and the living room, as well as school turns out to be a case of biting off too much. There's a lot of work involved in all three of those, and its been a little bit daunting. I'm currently a bit behind in everything, especially posting. But here's where I was last month!

 

First off was removing the carpeting and padding in five foot strips. I had some help on this, because apparently the padding is The Most Fun Thing Ever. Because Zulu spends a lot of time in this room, he has been supervising all of the work.

 

Once Zulu wore himself out by rolling around, I was able to remove the rest of the padding.

 

And once the strips were taken up, they were removed courtesy of Daddy's Dumping Service.

 

This left some very very ugly plywood. It's in much worse shape than the other rooms have been in so far. I'm not sure if its because this is a higher traffic area, or just the luck of the crappy-construction draw. There are a lot of holes, gashes, and other grossness.

 

This means a lot of extra filling work. It's going to take a lot of goo.