We live in an 1895 Queen Anne Victorian.  A large, lovely home with a list of projects as far as the eye can see.  It was a funeral home for about 30 years and the last owners had a devil may care attitude to it’s upkeep.  Fortunately it is a solid house so the bones are good but we are slowly making our way through the list.  My husband had to create a kitchen when he moved in.  Used to be the casket show room.  Originally it was a three room kitchen with a back room attached.  He also had to redo the roof, rebuild the chimneys, and when I moved in we had to redo the carriage house foundation.  Do not let trees grow near foundations!  If you do, you too can have a hole large enough to drive a VW bug through.

Because there are so many rooms and projects we try to as much of the work ourselves.  We haven’t won the lottery after all and given our luck with that we can’t count on it.  🙂

Our kids were down in Florida for a couple of weeks this summer so we thought it was time to redo our daughter’s wood floor.  If you want to know how much stuff your child has accumulated over the years, go empty their room.  I dare you.  And we don’t buy her a ton of stuff!

I don’t believe this floor has been redone since it was put in so we were in for a lot of sanding as the stuff they used back then was pretty tough.

So we set off to rent a floor sander, get the masks, sandpaper for the floor sander, then hand sanders, and the stain we wanted.  As it was a pine floor and there isn’t a chance in hell to match the original stain colour we decided to have contrast and went with a light colour.

I was very happy to say goodbye to this:

Of course we had to deal with this little monster:

It’s very hard for me to be on my knees for any length of time because of my back, especially hand-sanding so I ended up using the floor sander.  I managed to keep it from dancing about.  And oh the dust!  Even with the windows wide open it was a mess.  We had her doors shut but it still got everywhere.  And of course you have to do a few layers with finer and finer paper.

The edges gave us a run for their money and it took awhile to get it all smooth and clean.  Then there is the cleaning.  Everything had to be vacuumed, including the walls.  The we bought the Swifter stuff and used that.  And vacuumed some more.  Then a coat of staining and 3 coats of poly.  But we got it done!

It’s nice to walk on a floor and not worry about splinters!  🙂  Our daughter was very surprised and loved it.  Good thing to as we weren’t changing it again!