While Dustin has been busy problem solving the kitchen ceiling, I have been spending my in-between time stripping and scraping this wood floor.
When we moved into this house, this floor was old blue carpet on top of 1960's linoleum tile on top of a layer of tar on top of some wood floors. At the time we were really nervous about the tiles being plaqued with asbestos so we did absolutely nothing. We recently needed to pull up the blue carpet to fix some plumbing issues and my sweet, amazing, delightful husband decided to start ripping up all the carpet...which led him to rip up all the tiles too. (I am sure none of your husbands suffer from house project impulsive behavior...)
After examining the wood, we decided to just restore the floor to its former glory. The wood is fir and lovely. Well, we think, mostly, because half of the room is/was covered in this tar glue substance.
I did some research how to "pull" the tar off the floor and decided to use stripper on the really thick areas. Most of the strippers out there are pretty crazy and toxic. I settled on using a "citrus" stripper because it is less toxic and doesn't emit as many fumes. Which is good for a household with children running about.
It worked surprisingly well. I would paint it on and return later in the day to scrap it off. This method was really condusive to a busy mom who can't always devote hours to one single task.
Overall this was a very labor intensive task, but completely worth it. (best arm/core workout ever) The floors have cleaned up nicely and all that time I spent scraping, I spent thinking. I spent this repetitive time problem solving, list-making (sometimes I make lists Tricia!), praying about my kids and wondering what in the world my life has become.
Clearly there will be more pictures of the floor as we continue to repair, sand, stain and seal. My goal iss to have the room ready for sanding by friday. Fingers crossed!
3 comments:
We have pine floors in the "casual" parts of our home (upstairs bedrooms/kitchen) and hardword in the "formal" areas (livingroom/dining turned bedroom). We refinished the pine upstairs a couple of years ago and they are beautiful now. It will be very much worth your effort and they are so easy to keep clean too. Certainly better than old carpet and especially better than tile/linoleum! What was it w/linoleum anyway??? We pulled some out of our living room entry when we moved in. Why cover up such a great thing?
Our entire house has a layer of linoleum tile. I know it was an "era" thing, but it just comes off as a too cheap/lazy to do something better thing. Luckily for the house, I like doing hard things... plus wood floors are super lovely.
I'm super impressed! I thought our floors were bad but you have done some serious work to get that tar off! Way to go.
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