Den Renovation: Removing Black Mastic Again!

Although we did the lion's share of work on our hardwood floors last summer, there was still one more room left with tile and black mastic.  We put off starting this room for a whole month, and then we had to face the facts that if we didn't do this room now, it would be a whole year before we can get to it again.  (We do a lot of work during the summer because we teach school during the academic year.)

 Here you have it: tile, black glue, and beautiful floors underneath.

 I highly recommend using a mask, eye protection, and gloves when working on something like this.

Once the tiles are removed, we were left with a room mostly covered in black mastic (it's awful stuff for many reasons).  We know from last year that some of the mastic is surface, but that some of it soaks into the wood itself.  We also knew we (meaning Mike) would need to scrape off the surface mastic with a heavy dose of mineral spirits.  Again, we highly recommend protective gear and lots of good ventilation for this process.

Thanks to the awesome guys at our Home Depot tool rental, last year I was given a pep talk that I would be able to handle using a drum sander.  So once the surface mastic was up, I went down to HD to get my drum sander and A LOT of sand paper rolls.  I started with 36 grit, which is the exact aggression this kind of situation needs and went through about 10 rolls of sandpaper before it came out looking like this.

Sanded floors, pre-poly.

After the 36 grit removes the mastic and other imperfections, I moved to a 100-120 grit to smooth out all of the wood.  In addition, I used the edger from the HD rental to work on places where the drum sander cannot reach along the walls.  Once this step is complete, the room needs a really good vacuuming and tack cloth application to remove any dust and sawdust, and then you're ready for polyurethane.

Here are the restored floors after applying poly.

After about a week of letting the floors fully dry we will be ready to put down an area rug and furniture!

If you're thinking about gluing something to your hardwood floors -- STOP!  Don't do it!  At the very least, put down a subfloor to preserve the hardwoods for any future owners or future restorations.  There was no reason this should have happened in this house, and I blame it on the stupid house trends in the 1960s.

Dining Room Dreaded Black Mastic

When you are ripping things up and out of an old house, you just never know what you may find.  We had a good hunch that the entire house had hardwood floors, but what we didn't know is what exactly we would have to do to restore them.

When we began ripping up the tile in the dining room we found this somewhat thick layer of black mastic directly on the hardwood.  After a lot of internet research and a failed attempt with heat guns, I tried applying some citrus mastic remover.  After hours and hours of hand-scraping a small area, I had made minimal progress.  The next thing I tried is when I had the square buffer sander for the upstairs floors, I decided to try it out on the black floors here.  Didn't work.  The sand pad became immediately gunked up -- heat + friction = no sanding off glue.

As the days passed and we made great progress on lots of other projects, we began to fret about this one -- how the hell were we going to get this black stuff off the floors.  I called a couple of professional companies and they were not interested in doing the work -- for one, they wanted to sell me engineered hardwood instead; and two, they were afraid of doing more damage to the floors.

Then Mike came up with a great plan to use mineral spirits.  These are strong, but not as strong as some of the other products out there.  So we ventilated the room well, taped it off from the rest of the house, and then Mike spent two nights (up all night kinda nights) scraping the mastic off after it soaked in mineral spirits.

After as much of the mastic was scraped off as we could, I went over to Home Depot to talk to my tool rental guy.  I had my heart set on getting the random orbital floor sander (it has three sanding discs on the bottom), but there were none left.  He only had square buff sanders (way too weak for this job) or the feared drum sander.  I showed him the pictures and he was pretty skeptical that any sander could fix the floors, but he convinced me to go with the drum sander.

Working with the drum sander was a lot like the first time I rode a roller coaster -- at first I was terrified, and then I was completely thrilled!  When used properly and carefully, a drum sander can be your best friend.  However, if you're not paying attention, it would take literally 10 seconds to screw up the floors completely.

The drum sander is exactly what we needed for this job.  It didn't make it simple -- I still changed the sandpaper at least 10 times because it kept getting gunked.  But the drum sander is what got us down to the original wood.

Here are the floors after polyurethane -- we decided not to stain any of the floors because just the natural hue with poly looks amazing.  Also, if you look closely, you can see that in a few spots there is a little haunting black mark -- these floors will never look like pristine brand new hardwood.  But the great thing is that they are original to the house and we worked our asses off to restore them!

Upstairs Bedroom

When we first moved in, we knew that in a few short months we would begin renovations.  One of the main goals of that renovation was to move our bedroom upstairs.  Initially, this bedroom was a stinky mothball room with weird stains on the walls and far too much laminate on the floors.

One of the features we really liked in this room were these cute white painted paneled closet doors -- very country cute.  However, the one thing we needed to accept was that all the beautiful trim was painted white.  Maybe one day we will replace all of the trim, but considering our timeline we decided to keep it as-is.

Obviously the first part was ripping up and out all the laminate floors to prep them for refinishing.

For months and months before we got this house, I watched far too many episodes of Rehab Addict and watched Nicole Curtis obsess over hardwood floors.  We were pretty certain we had hardwood floors throughout the entire house, so it's all I dreamed about for sixmonths it took us to close.

Even though there isn't any furniture in this picture, it's by far my favorite because of the floor/wall contrast. (*swoon*)  Also, I would recommend installing the air conditioner before you begin painting -- I did a lot of renovation work upstairs in my bra and shorts.  At least there's no dress code for this kind of work!

The day we got to "move in" to the upstairs was a special day because it meant that upstairs renovations were done and we could move down to the rest of the house.

Refinishing Tongue & Groove Subflooring

From watching too many episodes of "Rehab Addict," I was quite excited about finishing some hardwood floors.  The day after school ended, we started demo on the second floor.  We thought that taking up the tile and subflooring was going to take a long time, but honestly we had it all pulled up in about a day and a half.  (Thank goodness my brother came to help!)

Here I'm still in my pajamas and slippers.

Underneath the tile was wide plank tongue and groove attic decking.  It was never really "meant" to be sanded and finished as a hardwood floor, but the great thing about owning a home and doing your own renovations is that you call the shots.  This flooring was beautiful and rustic and exactly the character that we like to surrounded ourselves with.

Since the floor was never "meant" to be finished, all the boards were nailed in place using top nails.  And to run a sander over the floor meant that every single nail needed to be driven below the surface of the board.  With the help of some coffee and a good weighted hammer from the wood shop, we worked for about three hours just driving nails.

Because there was no previous stain or poly on these boards, we didn't need a heavy duty sander.  So we went to Home Depot and rented the buffer sander with some rather rough paper.  That combination did the trick of smoothing out the boards without being too harsh.  After a rough sand paper pass with the sander, I moved up to a finer sand paper to finish off the sanding job.

The first sander I had the pleasure of renting.

There's a clear difference, even with a light sanding.

The next step was staining, which I did by hand, with a rag.  After a day or so of letting that dry, I put on two coats of polyurethane (non glossy finish).  And, voila! the first refurbished hardwood floors in our new place!