It was love at first stain

Last night Justin started to stain for the first time. So it took us from July 3rd to July 14th to start staining. Our neighbour insinuated yesterday we were going slow, but we've only had 2 weekends, and Justin is working alone 95% of the time with me taking care of Charlie. I would say we have spent all together about three 12 hour days, plus evenings totaling maybe another 20 hours working on the house total. Combined with help from dads, friends and me, maximum time spent on the floors is likely only 80 hours. That includes time spent demo'ing the plaster and lath (about 30 hours or more), ripping up the old vinyl, lino and tar adhesives (about 25 hours),removing the nails , and doing fixes and we've really only spent about 30 hours maximum actually on the floors. People are so impatient!

If you are going to sand, make sure you prep your cracks FIRST. Going back over everything after trowel filling all the cracks was indeed demoralizing (same neighbours asked how demoralized I was feeling yesterday. I refused to give in to that, and took it as a challenge frankly).

The other thing was that we were going to water pop the floor which means wetting it down first to bring the grain up, which helps with the colour. However, after I last-minute researched, we realized this would take a whole extra day because you need the humidity to be the same after wetting, and you need a humidity measure, and you need  a way to keep the water consistent, etc, etc. You could make it so perfect, and of course, we don't want to redo it in 5 years. But you also have to accept that it's a small house that will have rugs, furniture and a little guy on it. Will we really notice in a month? I hope not.

Anyways, here are some photos of the stain. We thought at first not to do a second coat, but I think it needs it now that we saw last night's result dry.

The far left shows the dried stain from last night. 

This is fresh (stinky) stain. When the trim is put back on, it should really pop. For now, the first thing my eye was drawn to was the messy wall/floor edge.Hopefully the contrast will take away from the sanding, stain marks on the floor which were inevitable from years of abuse and neglect (okay fine, plus our own abuse put on it).

Before and After flooring.

 Justin is back sanding today because the drum sander marks between the drum and the edger was showing up really light. Me, I whipped over for the umpteenth time to Home Depot to buy yet more sanding paper. I am actually getting to enjoy Home Depot, which I never thought was possible.