There’s been a while since the last episode of the whirlwind month of work after we moved in. That’s because, can you imagine, the work has just continued…

Anyway, when we ended, we were just about to go pick up my Dad at the airport and start sanding the floors. We were going to rent a floor sander from Home Depot, and the guy convinced us to not rent the “drum sander” but instead go with the oscillatory “buffer”, because it was less aggressive so that if you made a mistake, you wouldn’t gouge a big hole in the floors. Sounded good, so we took it home and chief machinist Bengt had at it.

Bengt does the first passes in the office with the “buffer”.

You may notice that it doesn’t exactly cut aggressively in the picture above. In fact, it barely scratched the surface of the old, dark, varnish. We went up to the coarsest paper available, 20-grit, and even then it didn’t exactly work quickly. It didn’t help that the old varnish gummed up the paper so that after only a few minutes, the paper was essentially floating on a bunch of “blobs” of varnish stuck in the paper. Then we had to switch to a new paper, while one of the non-operating workers cleaned the paper by prying the varnish blobs off with a knife. After going over the room for an entire morning, it looked like this:

This is after a few passes with the buffer. Notice that there’s still a lot of the dark varnish left, especially on the planks that are a bit lower.

Clearly this was not going to be a quick process. At the end of the day, we finally had something that looked reasonably free of varnish.

After going for an entire day with 20-grit in the office, we were down to something that looked reasonably fresh. There are still low spots, though.

Since we had spent an entire day on one small room, this wasn’t going to cut it. While Bengt continued with the buffer in the other small room, we decided that I would go back to HD and get the drum sander and attack the living room / kitchen. It would take forever with the buffer.

The drum sander was a totally different beast. With a large cylindrical drum with sand paper on, it bit into the wood like nobody’s business. It still gummed up with varnish, too, but much less. The trick was to move fast to not let the floor heat up, and to stop after every pass and flick off the few large blobs that would accumulate. (If you didn’t clean it in time, you’d end up with a streak of molten varnish going the entire circumference of the drum, and those were not easy to get off.)

This is the first pass with the drum sander. After 10 minutes it’s already done about as much as an entire morning with the buffer.

After two passes along the grain in opposite directions, it looked pretty good, but there was clearly much dark wood left. But at this point the drum didn’t gum up any more, so it was even faster to go.

This is after a second pass in the opposite direction from the first.

After reading about sanding online, people said that going diagonally was the fastest way to even out the surface and get the fastest cut, so we decided to give that a try. Boy, did it work!

Here I’m half-way through the first diagonal cut. Look at that color difference, finally we’re pretty much down to fresh wood.

After another pass on the opposite diagonal, the floor looked even. However, you can still see the darker areas around the perimeter of the floor. Those were very persistent.

After the opposite diagonal pass, the floor looks pretty much even.

Finally, after going up to 36-grit and doing another pass along the grain to get rid of the diagonal pattern, it looked way better than the office did after after going a whole day with the buffer. This had taken less than half the time in a room with about three times the area!

After a 36-grit pass along the grain, it looks pretty good.

We should have gotten the drum sander to begin with…

With the hard work done by the drum sander, we returned it to HD and Bengt continued doing the finer grits with the buffer. Going all the way up to 80 (or was it 100) grit took a few days, but the result looked nice.

This is the office floor after going all the way up to 80 or 100 grit. Time to apply finish.

Now it was time to meticulously clean up the large amounts of dust that was covering everything in the house and proceed to applying the finish. That’s for next post.