So Many Men, So Little Time

This garage project is taking forever.

When last we left, the garage roof had just been framed and the old doors were still on the front. All that has changed. In fact, it's now early July and the garage is almost done. 'Bout freakin' time.

By the middle of June the garage had a roof and siding, as you can see here. Our original plan had called for a door in the back of the peaked roof so we could walk into our new storage space. That didn't work. For starters, the city didn't like that idea at all, saying it would turn the garage into "living space," which would trigger all sorts of zoning problems. That turned out to be moot, because the peaked area of the garage is only about three feet high. There's no way you could walk into it, so no need for a door.

Instead, we put in a hatch. From inside the garage, we just pull a rope in the ceiling and out pops a folding ladder, like an old attic hatchway. That'll give us access to the storage space above, and convinces the city that we're not renting out the space to illegal aliens.

After the roof and hatch came weeks and weeks of... nothing. We could hear the power tools but couldn't see much progress. The guys were doing detail work to the front, making the peak match the gables on the house. They did a terrific job, but it seemed to take forever, and we're paying them by the hour.

By late June the garage doors had come off and the three remaining sides had been covered in ship-lap siding, just like the house. The center concrete post is also gone, replaced by a much narrower framed-in one. Now we're ready for doors. Hah!

The Human Stain

After sanding comes staining!

Our marathon sanding session took all weekend but that was nothing compared to the stain and finish work. Kathy and I stained all three rooms (parlor, hallway, dining room) to match the bedroom on this floor. Now there's no carpet anywhere and everything is stained the same color (except the kitchen floor, which is redwood instead of oak).

Staining large rooms is harder than you'd think. Or at least, harder than we'd thought. You have to wipe the stain off the wood after about 15 minutes, which means you can only stain as much as you can reach in that amount of time. Stain too much floor and you won't be able to wipe it off in time. Stain too little and you'll be working forever. Stain the wrong parts and you'll paint yourself into a corner. So we did each room in strips: Stain about three feet across the room, wait 15 minutes, wipe off, repeat.

After it's stained, the wood has a nice dark color, but looks a bit flat and grainy. The clear coat fixes that.

They no longer make the oil-based polyurethane clear coat that we used last year on the bedroom floor, so we had to find a water-based poly that would give us the same finish. I think we got pretty close. The threshhold strip between the bedroom and the hallway is the only place the two different finishes meet each other, and the difference there is pretty much invisible.

Applying the poly coat presents the same challenges as the stain, but for a different reason. You don't have to wipe the polyurethane off, but you do have to somehow cover the entire floor without walking on your fresh poly coat. So Kathy and I strategically divided each room into "his and hers" zones, got identical lamb's wool applicators, and worked across the floor toward the door. Last one out finishes the doorway!

Four successive coats of poly did the job, with about 4 hours drying time between each coat. Overall, it took a couple of days, with lots of TV watching and walks on the beach in between. After the first night, we tip-toed across the floor in our socks. I don't think we wore shoes upstairs for a week.

All in all, I'd have to say we did a pretty good job. We find maddening imperfections here and there, like brush marks or dust trapped in the finish coat. But it's done now, it's nice, and it's a lot better than the ratty old carpet that used to be here.