End of the quarter madness

Posting will be light around here for the next couple of weeks as I wrap up the quarter, get my term papers written, and try with all my might to finish my master's thesis so it won't be hanging over my head anymore. I'm about 20-25 pages away from being done with the thesis, which theoretically means I could write two pages a day for the next two weeks and be more than done. In practice, however, I am still trying to think through some of the things I am writing and I don't feel ready to commit to one particular reading yet. Or maybe I am just using that as an excuse because I don't want to work on the project. In any case, I can't quite justify spending too much time with the CB for a bit until I get some of this other stuff done.

To tide you over, this is what I spent many hours earlier this month working on:



Nearly done sanding! There are some places that are stained from water damage that chemically adhered the foam carpet backing to the wood and almost petrified the wood, but I think when I stain the whole floor it will even those spots out somewhat and, anyway, who wants a totally perfect floor? The rest of the CB has character - the floor might as well, too.



The quick run-down on the floor is:

1.) First weekend I owned the house Paul and I rented a rotary sander and went over every inch of the floor about a million times. I think we probably spent about 17 hours on this step. It was brutal.

2.) I made good friends with the belt sander and palm sander as I went around the edges of the floor and got all the places the rotary sander couldn't reach as well as going over some tough spots on the floor after we returned the sander. I'm estimating about 12 hours of this so far (I still need to get a few more spots around the edges of the room and also around the heater grate in the floor).

3.) I borrowed some flat, metal scrapers from Amy's dad Bob and have been going over every join in the floor scraping the edges of the boards that are a little lower where it's hard for the belt sander to reach. Probably 8 hours of this so far.

So I'm estimating the grand total so far to be around 37 hours of sanding. On one hand it doesn't sound like that much, but on the other hand, I spent at least 20 hours of that on my hands and knees on a hardwood floor, so it's not insignificant, I don't think. I should be able to finish up the last of the sanding in about two or three hours, then it'll be time to clean the floors really well so there's no dust and then we can stain. The stain only needs about six hours to dry before we can seal it, so that will be a relatively easy weekend project. The sealer has to cure for a week or so before I can put furniture in, and then it'll be moving day. I'm a bit behind schedule for moving (it'll probably be more like the end of March, so not mid-February as I had hoped), but school is important, much as I'd like to forget about it and only work on my house until it's done.

Still, I'm so close I can almost taste it...