(g)range life

Do you consider yourself a hardwood floors sort of person? Do you like, love hardwood, equate it with some kind of pinnacle in home-owning that you would cherish it as if it were one of your own? Are you so into hardwood that if you could, you'd like a whole house of untreated hardword? Well boy, do I have a treat for you!

Welcome to the second floor of the Grange.

Almost immediately after I started this whole thing, I bemoaned to RJ that we just didn't take enough before pictures. No one would know how much we've been through! No one would understand and be adequately impressed with our (RJ's) hard labor! I pouted. RJ sort of shrugged as he is wont to do whenever I pout about unimportant things like not being able to impress our friends enough.

And then I opened my Picasa, and was like, oh, duh. Of course we took pictures. Of course we did! Whew. Most of the before pictures were taken on a dreary fall afternoon in October, and I can almost feel that raw late fall feeling creeping into my bones looking at these pictures. Ugh, fall. Anyhow! 

This picture is taken in what's now the doorway into the kitchen. You can see our old piano (R.I.P.), the stage for meetings (again, the piano and the stage are here because this was a meeting space, and at grange meetings, there was a lot of singalongs. There were also pews that filled the rest of the room, but those were sadly not included in the sale). There's also a milk pail there, for good measure. 

So obviously, one of the first (and biggest) tasks was to sand and polyurethane the floors and to sand and stain the walls and ceiling. Most of the floor was covered with this grayish paint that due to the way it clogged up any and all sanding equipment lead RJ to believe it was probably some kind of boat paint. They probably used whatever was cheapest and in the largest quantities, so who knows.

Really though, this part sucked.  I got to do the edges and corners, RJ used a larger scale sander to do the open spaces and that machine required more wrangling than a little hand sander, hence the job assignments. In order to sand well with a hand sander, you need to apply some pressure and sort of massage the floors. I was terrible at this and even worse at replacing the sand paper (which was necessary quite often due to the above-mentioned vinyl paint).  

I did, however, find my calling in the ShopVac. No one is better with that machine than me, I promise!

Ultimately, this whole process probably took us two weeks of working every night after work. We also had some help from our friends who were able to work there during the day. And thankfully, we hired one of RJ's buddies to stain the walls and ceiling. And please don't judge me if we don't get to sanding the downstairs floors until, oh, 2016.