Sanding, days 2-3

For all my complaining, we are a lot closer after yesterday's work.

If the drum sander was my bitch, I was totally the edger's bitch. Sorry for the rough analogy, but there you have it. The thing was 45 pounds, only about a foot tall, and you had to either kneel or bend over and drag it around the room. Kneeling isn't practical since you can't move fast enough to not F-up the floors, so your back is killing you five minutes in. The instructions claim you don't have to remove the moulding, but what they mean is the machine doesn't hurt moulding. It can't actually make it all the way to the wall in many spots, so there is still a lot of work to do.

We got the same amount of sand paper rolls that we did for the drum sander, which wasn't really enough. No matter though, since we only had a limited time and couldn't really get to everything anyway.

Alex did 99% of the work, with me relieving him twice for about 4 minutes each time. I vacuumed a little and made sure he didn't trip on the chord, but I'm really not strong enough to use that machine. If I did this again (and I will, in my bedroom) I will buy a more powerful plug-in hand sander and use that instead. Our little hand sander isn't designed for extremely rough work, so the lowest grit the paper sheets come in is 80. Hence, it taking so long to do final touch ups.

Others come in 36, so that's my recommendation. The edger is awkwardly designed, heavy, and you have to change the paper every 10 minutes anyway, so a hand sander is a better bet.

Stupid sander disks! Why can't you handle a little floor finish? Wimps!

Our little hand sander does still get mucked up really fast by the floor finish, though, so I've gone through a lot of sheets of 80 in the last few days. Hopefully we'll be done in another 2, which is about when I expect the (expensive as all hell!) non-VOC floor stain to arrive.

We are so close (ish) to having two usable rooms!!