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Week 3 |
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| Realizing how quickly I was moving along, Amy quickly returned early in week three with a further revised schedule which included painting, replacing crown molding, and new electrical wiring for power and recessed lighting. It became obvious that my three week project would be at least four weeks, probably five. Which is not a bad thing. So much of it falls into the "well, if you already have this ripped out, why not rip that out" category. |
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| Having heard that drum sanders are unweildy and possibly dangerous to the floor, I opted to rent a "square buff" sander. | The square buff sander is easy to use, it practically floats across the floor when it's on. I had earplugs in. It's pretty loud. | Basically, is just a random orbit sander which uses large bits of sandpaper held to a buffer pad by adhesive. |
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Square buff sanders are for
girls. More precisely, they're for girls doing their nails. I sanded the kitchen floor 8 hours a day for two days and I might as well have been yelling at it trying to get the finish off. To say it was slow going is to do woeful injustice to the phrase "slow going". The slowness of this sander is geologic. |
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| There are two sets of pencil marks drawn onto the floor, presumably by the people who laid the tile floor over it. I couldn't get these up. | I tried intensive attention with a random orbit palm sander but it did nothing. | Finally, I got desperate and tried the edger, which got the pencil marks up but scalloped the floor and left burn marks. |
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| The edging tool I'd read was "aggressive". Indeed it was. it cut through things that the square buff wouldn't touch. It was insane. | But it also burned the floor when I tried to use it to get rid of the pencil lines. | After 8 hours on Sunday it was time to take the sander back. This is as good as it got. Noticeably better, but i think 16 hours with a Brillo pad might have done me better. |
| The more work I did in the kitchen, the more a set of walls on the second floor began to trouble me. They must come out. Oh heavens. |
[back to the kitchen]
[back to week two]
[onward to week four]
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