The finished product

This will be the last in a three part installment on the refinishing of our living room.  To finish off the floor, we ended up putting a polyurethane over the paint.   Now it's just about perfect as far as finish and clean up capabilities as far as we are concerned.

So here are a few pictures of the room after we got our things back in....

We like it quite a bit so far!  The outer edge of unpainted wood is hardly visible since we put our stuff back, but we knew it would be that way.   All in all we think it turned out really well.

~Gabe

Continuing on.....

As you know, we've been working at enhancing our living room floor....   We chose to paint the center area of the floor, leaving the finished wood on the outside of the room alone.

This is not a tutorial, but we took a lot of pictures.   First thing to do was figure out the exact size of the area we would paint.  Getting it precisely the size we wanted was crucial, as you will see.

 Time to put a coat of primer on that old unfinished wood.

 After some drying time, Jenny applied the base coat while the children watched enviously.

 Nothing like a cup of coffee to speed drying time.   Well, that and a wood stove.   Actually, the wood stove speeds the drying time tremendously.   You just crank the stove up as warm as you can stand it in the house and that drying time shrinks quite a bit.

 Ok, here's where the fun starts.   And here's why it's so important for this rectangle to be perfectly square.    It's going to have diamonds in it, and they've got to be perfect!

 Taping the diamonds was sort of tedious.   The tape has to keep jumping from one side of the line to the other.

 Done taping!   The squares with tape in them don't get paint.....   (It's easier than you might think to start painting in the wrong one)

 Time to paint the tape with the base coat.   This ensures (hopefully), that any leaking under the tape is done by the color that's under there anyway.

Checkers!   We're going to play checkers!

 After one coat....   We put several coats of red on, and went to bed.

 After another coat in the morning, it's the moment of truth!  Time to pull up tape.   Yep, we got a little too hurried and put tape on before we should have.   We have a  few boo boo's to fix.

 So, add a little primer on the bad spots, and then a little fine tuning with an artists brush....

 And here we are!   It's going to sit a day or two before we move furniture onto it.   Since it is specifically a floor paint its not supposed to need any finish over it, but it's not as glossy as we thought, so we might end up putting a finish on it to make it a little easier to clean.

That's it for now.   We'll have to try and get a picture up once we have the room arranged again.   We aren't to anxious to move that piano over this paint for a few days at least.   It's time for bed, but let us know what you think!

A Work in Progress

I bet you know where this is headed.  

This morning we decided that it was time to pull that old worn out carpet out of the living room.   Well, my wife sort of decided that she'd had it up to 'here' (that's about throat level) and that now was as good a time as any for me to follow through on the promise I'd made to help her take it out this winter.    She was right, I'd been promising to do it "when work gets slow", and it looks as though right now is as slow as we'll get, even though it isn't actually that slow.

 So we moved the stuff.   All the stuff that is, except the piano, which we covered up.   We put  a sheet over the opening to stop all the dust, and got started.   I guess you can see from the pictures that it really WAS time for the carpet to go.

 Starting to pull it up.....

 We cut it down the center so it would come out in two pieces.

 Gwen was quite eager to help!

 Myles liked playing peek a boo.

 Whew!  Got the worst part done!   The carpet came out really easy, the pad underneath wasn't bad either except for all the dirt!   It was only an accumulation of  50 years or so, but it really was kind of bad.

 Time to get down on our hands and knees and put a little elbow grease into this.

 The center of the room must have had an area rug, and the outsides were finished.   That was, of course, prior to the carpet (yes, THAT carpet) being there for fifty years.   (I say fifty years, but it's probably longer, that would only go back to 1963)

 Did I mention the dirt?   We dumped out five or six buckets like that.  

This is what it looks like where the unfinished and the finished meet up.  

So I'm sure you're wondering..  Now what?   So are we.   We're going to either paint it, re-carpet it, or possibly (but quite unlikely) just get an area rug of the same size as they used fifty or more years ago and let that old wood as it is.  

I guess whatever we decide will likely be the subject of the next blog!   Any great ideas are welcome in the comments section!