The Sands of Time

After ripping out all the second-floor carpet, we chemically stripped (most of) the goo that was holding down the carpet padding. Some rooms were worse than others, but they all needed attention.

That job completed, the next step was to sand down the floors and (we hoped) sand off the last remnants of goo that the toxic sludge couldn't take off. We rented the very same floor sander we used last May--exactly one year ago!--and hauled that sucker upstairs again.

Now a year older and wiser, we knew ahead of time that sanding around 800 square feet of floor space was gonna generate a lot of dust. So we taped off the doorways and put towels under doors to minimize the mess. There's no way to prevent the sawdust from going down the stairs, so we just... hoped. After sealing off everything as best we could, Kathy vacuumed up, as you can see.

I gotta say, 60-grit sandpaper under a 200-pound floor sander tears through rough patches pretty durn quick. It took off the worst of the adhesive goo real nice. Very encouraging. But after the first initial scrape, it starts to get boring and tedious. And it makes my hands go numb.

We did three rooms, and each room got sanded three times, each time with finer sandpaper. The sandpaper disks load up with dust pretty quickly, so you have to stop often and clean off or change the sandpaper. The weekend rental for the floor sander was about $75; we spent over $120 on sandpaper for it and filled an entire wastebasket with discarded discs.

But the end result was pretty nice: smooth floors stripped of any goo, gunk, glue, or residual stain. Now for the fun part.