Progress: The First Wave

The first wave of projects at Liberty were mostly functional: A new roof, working bathroom and kitchen fixtures, and a refinished floor in my future temporary bedroom. Here’s where everything ended up after the last two weeks…

New Roof: Finished!

Here’s what it looked like before…

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And now…

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Refinish Floor: 1 of 3, Finished!

It would have been way more impressive to have all of the floors finished, but I’ll take one room and be happy about it.

Here’s the before…

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And the new look…

This was at least 16 passes with the drum sander, one pass of 100 grit with the small orbital sander, two coats of RustOleum wood stain in Dark Walnut, and two coats of Fabulon poly in Satin (with another sanding of 220 with the orbital between coats.)

It’s not perfect. The problem with staining floors late at night is both the bad lighting and the lack of patience one could associate with inhaling lots of VOCs after midnight

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But I actually love the way it looks. When I was half-way through this project I was all, “I’d rather have staples shoved into the tender part of my foot than do this in the other two rooms”, then this morning I walked barefoot up my stairs and had a staple shoved into the tender part of my foot, and after I got done swearing I decided that renting the sander for another few weekends might be doable. We’ll see.

The next wave of projects includes more functional stuff like continuing to haul the 4,375 boxes of junk I’ve collected over the last decade and about half of my tool collection out of the rental…

Oh, and moving every piece of furniture I own out of the the foyer. Is it strange that all of my furniture basically fits in the hallway?

Then I’m going to take a time out from the heavy lifting and install the flooring I bought for the small downstairs bedroom, so I can set up a functional office space. After that, you never know… I might go crazy and paint something.

6 Responses

  1. At some point I’d love to hear how you handle the transitions from room to room when you only refinish one room at a time – id love to give it a go.

  2. Roof and floor looks great. Thanks for the pictures. Keep them coming–it is so much fun to see that wonderful old house and all that you are doing! Hurray for you having all your stuff in one place.

  3. The sanded floor brings back memories of monotony behind a sander, but your floors look fantastic.

  4. You can really see the cupping of the floor boards in the before photo. The dark stain and the satin finish look great.

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