Dust, Dust Everywhere (cough-cough)!

The remodeling is going quite slowly.  Tom has added another skill to his home improvement repertoire - wood floor stripping.  Hopefully the refinishing will go well, and a lot easier than the paint/stain/gunk removal.  But to start off, here's another lovely picture of myself (pulling staples out of the floor in my pajamas)...

While I was pulling out about a thousand staples, Tom was stripping the paint off of the door trim with the heat gun.  Both jobs took a loooong time.  Tom was only able to get one door done before he decided to work on something else.  Oh, and he's wearing pajamas too - even though you can't tell.  That's how we roll around here.

Slow and stead - and extremely boring work.

Here is the unloved hard wood floor.  It is soon to become Tom's masterpiece.  It really needed a lot of work.  We figured it out and this wood floor is about 113 years old.  That's a lot of wear and tear.  It's also about an inch-and-a-half thick!  They don't make flooring like that anymore!

Tom, running the drum sander.  They warned us when we picked it up at the rental place that this machine was pretty powerful - to be careful because it would sand the wood right down to a stick.  Tom told them that it's just what we were looking for.  It had to be able to do a tough job.  It worked pretty slick, too!  While Tom ran the sander, Winston and I took turns running the shop vac.  Even with the vacuming, hanging plastic and closing doors, we had dust EVERYWHERE!  We also looked like real dust bunnies ourselves.  It's definitely a dirty job!

And the hard work pays off!  Tom had to do a little finishing here and there with the belt sander.  He also wasn't able to get all of the "gunk" out of the corners because the heat gun died.  He's having it looked at by the resident genius from work.  Then he can finish the job.  But even just the sanded floor looks awesome!  Can't wait to add a little stain and poly to it.  Next weekend we hope to start the sheet rock work.  I also have to paint the ceiling.  There's enough here to keep us busy for a good month at least!