Syracuse Thanksgiving 2010

Click on the picture of Aunt Jane to see the rest of the album.

Closet Installation Part I

Before JoePa won #400, we picked up the components for our closet organizers. There are four closets in our master bedroom and they are each a different size. I hope we can keep all of our measurements straight.

You know a project is going to be a success when you read the instructions.

One closet down, three to go.

I can help AND take pictures at the same time!

In our rush to get home to watch the game, we miscalculated a few quantities, so we'll have to make a trip back to Home Depot tomorrow. I'm sure you can imagine how upset Andrew must be about that. (Yeah right.)

And for a little perspective, this is what the closets looked like before.

Happy Fall 2010 !

Fall 2010 at Penn State

Finishing the Wood Floor

The last steps in finishing the floor are applying a sealant and two coats of polyurethane. Forty-five minutes after applying the coat of sealant, we put down the first coat of polyurethane. Then 18 hours after we applied the second coat.

You can see a big difference just with the coat of sealant.

Actually, the final step is patience. The polyurethane needs time (recommended 72 hours) to cure and harden before you can walk on it and then even more time (recommended 2 weeks) before you can put any rugs or furniture on it.

We can hardly believe it's the same floor we started with a few weeks ago. What a huge difference! One more week of curing time and we can move in.

Next step: Closet organizers.

We rented a random orbit sander from Home Depot on Sunday to sand the floors in the master bedroom. For the most part we just needed to take down the layer of sealer, but there were a few paint, animal, and water stains that needed a little extra attention.

To protect the rest of the house, we stretched a piece of plastic over the doorway and put a fan in the window to create a vacuum and hopefully encourage any dust to blow out the window. To protect ourselves, we wore hearing protection as well as dust masks.

Because we have never finished a floor before, we watched a few instructional videos online, including on from the manufacturer of the sander.

The next step is to try to lighten the water stains that we couldn't sand out and fill in a few cracks with some homemade putty. After we clean up a bit we can seal the wood and start putting down the 2-3 coats of polyurethane.

Rug Removal

The cat woke us up at 6:30 Sunday morning, so we got an early start on the last coat of paint. After the painting supplies were clean up...correction...while Andrew was cleaning up the painting supplies, I started ripping out the rug. After wrestling the rug into manageable sections, it was in the dumpster at our town's transfer station by 2:00.

From the picture it just looks like there's debris on the floor, but it's actually paint from a previous owner. We've also got a large water stain in the far corner to deal with. Other than that, the floor is in great shape and just needs some TLC from the random orbit sander we'll rent from Home Depot.

After work tonight, I pulled all of the staples out of the hardwood floor. Now we just have to remove the tack strips from the rug, move a couple pieces of furniture and we're ready to sand and Polyurethane!