and this picture?
Six hours of mind numbing paint stripping at a temperature of 38 degrees. This wood is a nightmare. It is very dry and it splinters readily. Any ideas what kind of wood it is?
I plan to sand this floor to a paint grade and then paint it again since it is in bad shape. The only reason I am stripping it is because there are two layers of lac paint under that battleship grey color that will gum up the sand paper on the floor sander. It is easier and more cost effective to spend 4 days sitting down scraping with a heat gun and one day sanding then it is spending three days sanding and constantly having to change sand paper every 2 minutes.
I learned something today. Normally after stripping this much floor I have a headache. Today I have a cold so I stuffed some Kleenex in my nose to stop it dripping all over my floor and forming icicles on my lower lip and "voila" no headache! Of course my wrist and knees are sore.I wonder where I have shove some Kleenex in order to prevent that....
7 comments:
I don't think you can stop the icicles. On a cold day, working over something face down, the nose will drip.
It doesn't show pores among the rings, so I bet it's pine, a southern-yellow pine of sorts. Does most of the floor look like this photo up close? Sanding is obviously inevitable. You may want to isolate an area before you get much further to experiment your plan. I know it maybe too cold to paint right now, but it could be worth to test. Hopefully your paint will protect frome further splintering when done. I am also impressed that these old floor boards aren't gapped like the Grand Canyon being as old as they are. Good luck.
Oh, btw, I had a neighbor tell me that hemp twine stuffed in between old floor boards, if it gaps, will help the appearance. He didn't elaborate on the finishing process after one does this. I haven't tried it, but I think the thought it's more flexible than wood patch and will give with the seasons.
My ustairs has no hardwood, just the wide plank pine. It splinters readily so my guess is it's pine.
Eek, that wood looks really hard to work with. I can't tell what it might be. I don't see ring pores, but then again it looks a little bit like some of the oak I've run into that was so damaged that the ring-porous parts had selectively disintegrated. (I hope that's not what you have, because it splinters even worse when try to sand it in that condition).
Hey, at least we're up into the 40s today, so no more icicles. :)
I didn't have time nor the thought when doing my floors. However afterwards I figured a really quick way to deal with painted flat wood. A thickness planer. This is how I wound up doing the lion share of my baseboards on our second floor. Likely you would dull a set of blad es but would make the task so much easier. I figured out that it saved about 50 hours of work for me on our 150 liner feet of trim and baseboards and cost me one set of blades. Well worth the purchase of the planer and blades. The finished result was amazing. Even with fear of taking away to much of the aged character I was very pleased with the results. There was still plenty of dings and nail holes to give the distressed appearance I was after. I'm betting you could do your floor in no time this way.
AH! So I'm not the only one with that nasty, gunky, grey paint. In our house (we live down the hill from you in South Park) we call it "submarine paint." Only it's the bottom layer on all of our door and window woodwork, not on the floors. We took up old carpet in our upstairs and the wood looks similar to yours--lots of splinters in one room (we guess there was water damage at one point). It's wide pine planks. Not very nice looking. So we sanded a bit and painted them dark brown and Bob's your uncle. They look just dandy. Oh, and used paintable caulk in the wider cracks--it gives better than wood putty.
i own a flooring company and that paint can be sanded easily with the proper belts. you're wasting your time. it wouldn't take more than 2 hours to get that sanded. your a meathead.
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