Progress Report

Lots of progress to report. Chris's parents came up last weekend and did helped us with some gardening, no pictures yet. I'm trying to get Chris to post about the gardening since I hid inside sanding the floor while everyone else worked on the garden. I decided not to rent a sander so I've been doing the whole thing with a random orbital sander. I was concerned that if we rented a sander we would take off too much of the wood and that it would end up just a bit too perfect. In this whole project one of my overall goals has been to make the kitchen look like it belongs to the house.

With this goal in mind I've been going back and forth about floor finishes for quite some time. Most of our rooms still have the original shellacked floors with their nice orangey color. I toyed with the idea of doing the same in the kitchen but decided against it because of durability concerns, a kitchen is going to see a lot of water and it is very possible that alcohol may be spilled which could put the finish at risk. So then I was leaning towards doing an alcohol based stain to get a similar shade and then finishing with a water based poly I had a lot of concerns about that as well we have a lot of different boards pieced in to the floor that are a lot of different ages and I just didn't know how the different woods were going to take the stain and at this point I just don't have the heart to strip it down again and re-sand. So in the end I decided on Waterlox I think it's going to give me some of the color that I desire and it should be easily reparable but still have the durability that the poly would have given me.

I did some test areas with it this afternoon and I think it's going to work out wonderfully. Here is the sample from the stove area. The stove area is probably one of the areas in the kitchen with the most cobbled together flooring I figure if it can look good there it should look good anywhere.

Waterlox has a 12-24 hour cure time and unfortunately for us the kitchen serves not only as a kitchen but also as hallway so the plan is that I will begin starting tomorrow night at 6:00 and then do one coat each night until I'm finished. Fortunately we still have the stairs on the back of our house that used to lead up to the upstairs apartment so we should be able to avoid the room in the evenings while the finish is curing. I hope to finish up by Wednesday so the floor will have a day and a half to cure before the plumber comes Friday.