Hardwood Here We Come!

I told you all about our recent experience with water damage and how we ended up doing most of the repair work ourselves because we were afraid insurance wouldn’t be covering it.  What I’ve neglected to mention is that, while our insurance didn’t cover the roof repair because it was a defect in the roof, they did cover the water damage restoration – they even paid US for the work we did repairing the drywall!

We’ve pretty much finished everything we needed to do to get back to normal.  The last piece of the puzzle was to replace the little bit of carpet padding that had been cut out and have the floors cleaned and re-stretched.  We got an estimate to do that and it was obscene!  I could not believe anybody could actually give a bid so high without batting an eye!  The insurance company was going to pay it, though, so I asked if we could just have the money to put towards replacing the carpet, rather than repairing the ratty old carpet that was there anyway.  They said yes and sent us a check which would have gone a good ways towards re-carpeting the whole room.

But now my imagination was taking off:  I don’t want carpet in that room anyway – I want hardwood!  And if we do the living/dining room, then of course we should do our family room and have the whole downstairs be wood.  But then, what would we do with the wood that already ran from the entry to the kitchen?  It’s a light maple that is yellowing as it ages and I’m really tired of it. 

Thus began our foray into the world of hardwood and Oh My Lord! are there a lot of options.  It’s completely overwhelming!  Hundreds of types of woods, Millions of stain colors, and Bajillions of finishes.  How does anyone ever make a decision?

So, I decided that the best option was to lay down unfinished maple in the new rooms and sand down the existing wood, then have everything stained the same darker color.  Genius!  But then, I remembered Sarah over at pewter + sage talking about her floor dilemmas.  It seems maple doesn’t actually take stain well and they had some problems with the first coat of stain and had to call in the cavalry to get it done right.  But those floors turned out beautifully!

(Source: pewter + sage)

I mean seriously – they make my heart sing just looking at them.  I decided I had to have them and called a flooring installer that we’d heard good reviews for.  He wasn’t so keen on my idea, but said he try a sample and see how it turned out.

Fine and dandy, but then we started realizing what having your floors refinished means: we’d have to leave our house for several days and we’d somehow have to get our grand piano out of the front room and into the play room, which would mean hiring someone to take the legs off and turn it sideways to get it through the door (this piano was my great aunt’s and is over 100 years old – no one paid in beer was going to be touching this thing!)  Suddenly, pre-finished wood was looking more appealing again.

But then I remembered that that opens up the possibilities again and my head exploded.

OK, not literally.

Floor guy brought over some samples yesterday.  I realized I probably don’t want to go as dark as the floor that I love in the picture above and that I probably want to go with something that looks fairly traditional.

So, as it stands now, we’re looking at a 3 1/4” maple in Brandy.  Looks something like this (only not hand-scraped):

Of course, we’re still probably a month out before we actually pull the trigger on this thing, so I’m sure I’ll change my mind.  This is a terrifying decision for me.  The money outlay is huge and if I get it wrong, I’m stuck with it for a looong time.  I’m trying to remind myself that it’s a hardwood floor and that they’re all beautiful (way better than my carpet for sure) and that they’ll be partially covered with rugs, so it will all be fine.  Just fine…

And oh yeah, I’ve been wanting to replace the tile on my fireplace for forever and we know it would be much better to do that before the new wood goes in around it, so now I have to find a tile that I love for my family room AND I have to retile that area before I can have my new floors.

So many things to do!  So many decisions to make!  My head may yet explode.

Refinishing the Dining Table – Part 2

In my last post, I had suddenly decided that my dining table needed to be sanded down and re-stained RIGHT NOW (which seems to be how most of my projects come about).  The sanding went so well and I was so pleased with the results.  It was now time to pick the stain!

In case you missed it, here’s what the table looked like before:

 

I knew I wanted a much darker stain that would match my piano which is mahogany-ish.  At Lowe’s, I couldn’t find the exact stain I was looking for, but the closest I found was a two-in-one stain where the poly is already mixed in.  I really didn’t want to use a two-in-one, but I liked this color the best, so I went with it.  BIG MISTAKE!  This project was about to turn into one of the most frustrating/depressing projects I’ve ever done.

We took the table apart and moved it out to the garage so I could stain without destroying the carpet and fuming everyone out of the house.  SECOND MISTAKE!  It gets a little cold outside in December which makes the stain a little more difficult to apply.  Long, sad story short, it was so difficult to get the stain to go on without brush strokes showing and it would start to “seize up” so quickly that I had a horrible time getting the color to be even across the long expanse of the top.  If I had to do it again, I’d choose a simple stain that I could rub on and wipe off THEN do the poly last.  Even if I had to go with a slightly different color to do it.

I wanted it dark, so I had to do coat after coat – my heart breaking with each one.  I finally moved everything back into the house for the final coat.  That last coat was the easiest I did.  I so wish I had done that earlier. 

After the first coat where I dropped one of the freshly stained legs on the garage floor, getting little tiny pebbles into the stain, my husband figured out how to hang up the legs, so I could stain all sides at once and not worry about dropping them.

 

You can see a little bit of the wood pattern on the top here.  You can also see the horrible brush strokes.  With each coat I added, the beautiful pattern was disappearing.  So much sadness.

Finally, after (I think) 6 coats, the table was dark enough.  The brush strokes drove me nuts, but I wasn’t about to sand it down again – even if I thought it was possible without completely sanding through the veneer, so I decided to put it all back together again and just live with it for a while.

So, here’s what I’ve learned about staining:

1) NEVER use the two-in-one stain plus poly, the rub on wipe off stain is SO much easier to apply
1b) If you have to use the stain plus poly, get the best brushes you can
2) Don’t stain in a 40 degree garage – bring it inside if you have to
3) Breath (though maybe with a gas mask on).  Don’t panic.   If it’s not perfect, you can always cover it up with some cute decorations, right?

I’ve eaten at it now and I’ve even allowed guests to eat at it.  I’ve gotten some compliments on it and it doesn’t drive me as crazy as it did at first.  I think it’s a little more red than I wanted, so I might go grab another stain with poly in a slightly less red color and do one more coat over the top, but maybe I won’t.

Here it is now:

I found a paint color that matched the stain incredibly well and I painted the chairs.  My plan is to make white slip covers for them, so only the legs will be showing and there was no way I was going to sand those puppies down!  So far, I have about half of one slipcover done, but I’m liking the way it looks:

 

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