Thursday, September 4, 2008

The Story of the Floor

We have a beautiful living room and kitchen -and corner bedroom- which are not quite yet done (ceiling, in particular) but we love them. The floors are natural and they have a water-based polyurethane on them which I highly recommend. However, I must tell you though you would never know, that these floors were stained Minwax Jacobean three times before they got to stay natural. The first time, we hadn't done a good job sanding and the stain didn't adhere so we sanded it off. The second time we stained it, the first coat of Super Fast Drying Minwax Polyurethane didn't dry for a week. It turns out we maybe didn't wipe up all of the stain very well and the polyurethane wasn't sticking to it. So we sanded it off and did it again but took hours to carefully wipe up all of the excess stain immediately so that there was no residue at all on the floors when we put down Minwax Fast Drying Polyurethane. Three days later it was wet so we took it off again, afraid if it wasn't adhering to our floor that it wouldn't last. We're happy now and will never use Minwax again.
Here's a shot of our fireplace. It still needs a mantle and wood around the base of the hearth, but it looks so much better than it used to. I put a before picture up just to compare.
And just for fun, we got some cool new dining room chairs...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice work on the floors. We live down the street from you guys in another modern like house. Did you make it to the KCmodern bowling event?

Deanna said...

No way! You should stop by some time if you see us around. We didn't get to go to the modern bowling but we wanted to so bad. We were refinishing our floors that weekend and the timing didn't work out.

Beebs said...

Deagna + Zack.

It looks awesome, but I wonder if you can only have one dinner guest at time... Or do you make the others stand? :)

I need to come by sometime after Nov. 10. Can't wait to see it!

Deanna said...

The answer is... we don't have dinner guests!