Saturday, June 15, 2019

Floors Update

Alright, so there's been some major progress on the house this past week. All of the floors are sanded, and the 3 main rooms (all of the OLD floor) is done, which was 4 coats of varnish total. The floors went from a delightful sanded "blond" wood colour to a surprisingly deep/rich cherry colour. Some spots with damage have blotches which appear almost black, while some of the boards near the edges of the room, or which stayed for a very long period of time under furniture are more of a light yellow to light orange colour. At minimum I'd say that there are about 6 colours within the floor. The heavily traveled areas are more or less dark pinkish orange. All of this with just a simple clear coat (or 4).

I still haven't figured out what to do regarding photos for this blog. I may just use the default Google Photos "upload" option. Here's a preview that shows you an idea of the "sanded" VS clear coat. The difference in colour is jaw-dropping. EDIT: Actually if this photo works, I may just edit this whole post and add a whole bunch of other photos.

Edit: Okay so I'm not happy with the posted image. For whatever reason, the posted image that's been resized to 800x600 to fit the blog now appears really blurry and grainy. If you click full sized then it looks fine, but I don't understand why it looks so crappy. I'd expect this quality loss if I was trying to increase the image size, not shrink it.
Edit 2: Okay so I had manually resized the image from the default size option, which had not worked properly. Google Images through Blogger gives me unspecified size options. I switched it to "Xtra Large" which turns out to be only 640x480 (WTF?) Past this size is "Original Size" which will be way too large to display properly. I think I will just save my blog images at 800x600 and just have them be posted at "Original Size" to save headaches.

Today I managed to mix a "close enough" colour match, which was a mix of 3 different stains (2 types, 2 brands, 3 colours). I applied it earlier this afternoon and it's now drying. It's by far not a perfect match, but since the old floor has such a huge variety of colours in it, it should look fine. This colour will be on the main hallway and the staircase (treads and risers).

So now I'm letting that dry, and I will see if I can put the first coat of varnish on the hallway tonight. I'm so sick of the smell of varnish in the house, you can't even imagine. For most of this past week I've been sanding and varnishing the rooms one at a time. I'd do one before work, come home from work and do a second one. The next day before work I'd do the third room. That night I'd sand and recoat the first room, ad nauseam. I had originally planned to varnish everything in one shot (stain the hallway and varnish everything all together) but when I did a test of the clear coat on a scrap of the old hardwood and saw the colour shift, I knew there would be trouble, so I decided to do all the old floors FIRST, and then do the colour match. I'm really glad I did, because my colour would have been COMPLETELY different.

Oh, speaking of varnish, there was a bit of an issue there. I had been planning for YEARS now to use Spar Varnish (Helmsman) to varnish the floor, since it's beautiful, dries quickly, is waterproof, and has UV protection, BUT, when I actually went and bought the cans, and I was reviewing the label info, it specifically stated: Not recommended for floors. :( So instead I got Minwax Super Fast-Drying Polyurethane for Floors (oil based). It did dry fairly quickly -within 8 hours as stated, and id did sand nicely with just 250 grit paper by hand, so no major complaints. I used the satin sheen, and it truly is a satin, which is nice. I do want some gloss, but not a ton, so it's perfect. If I had one small gripe, it's that it didn't quite smooth-out and flow as nicely as some other varnishes. I did the entire floor by hand with a 4" brush, BTW.

So once the hallway is done (which will take several more days), then all the hardwood flooring will be done. At that point I can install and paint all the baseboards, and touch-up the office and living room (they are already painted, just not at the bottom), and then I can ALSO paint the front hall (blue), and the dining room, which I've decided will go the same light grey as the stairwell. This will mean that pretty much ALL of the main rooms in the house will be done except for the kitchen, and the upstairs spare room!

Stay tuned!

10 comments:

  1. The floor is looking great! I like the rich color.

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  2. Updated comment:

    Love your blog and all that your doing on your house. Using "View Image" in Firefox shows that the image displayed in the blog post is actually 400x300 scaled to 800x600, that's why it's blurry. When you click on it displays the image at it's full actual size of 1500x1125. Is this 400x300 size something that you have control of through either Blogger or Google Photos?

    This may be the information you need:
    https://support.pipdig.co/articles/blogger-how-to-make-images-full-width/

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for pointing this out. I had manually resized the default choice, which usually works, since it SHOULD simply be scaling down from the original, but APPARENTLY NOT. Best option is XL, which is still really small (640x 480), otherwise it jumps to "original size" as the next size option. These settings are surely carried over from when 1024 x 768 was "huge" for a monitor size.

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    2. According to the link I posted if you use "Original Size" Blogger will automatically scale it to fit the blog width.

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  3. Just read your blog from top to bottom, any loved it!!!!! Any chance you are continuing? Notice ur last post was June.

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    1. Hi Patty, I do still have quite a bit that I want to post, I've just been having a lot of image-hosting troubles. All the services I was using have switched to "pay" versions, and I don't want to pay a monthly fee for image hosting just for a free blog. I CAN use Google Photos, but I just hate it. They changed the way it works and it's just a pain to use.

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    2. JC:

      I posted this on July 2nd, but I don't know if you've seen it or not...

      According to the link I posted if you use "Original Size" Blogger will automatically scale it to fit the blog width.

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    3. Alex, I think I did read your original comment, and I can telly you for a fact that Blogger does NOT auto-resize it to fit the width. I just posted a new update, and if I use original size, the images extend was the text window (the "post" portion) and completely overlaps the side menu on the right hand side as well. I had to just re-save the images I planned to use (I used 960 x 720 just because I happened to have one image saved to this size?) and then I re-adjusted the custom widths on the blog to accommodate everything.

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    4. Sorry, I was passing along inaccurate information. Glad to hear that you were able to find a way to make it work. I just finished reading the new post and all your hard work looks fabulous!

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