Well, I’m back to work on the house.  Those 6 months of my knee problem ended in surgery and now I seem to be fine.  I should not have tried to finish a project by over doing it.  I just wanted it done and I paid the price.  Pace yourself.

(Recap) My plan is to do sections of the oak floors at a time so I won’t have to move everything out at the same time.  We’ll live around what I’m doing.  I realize it will take a long time to do it this way but it will be the least intrusive way of doing it.

Today I put on my work knee pads (will always do that now) and got out my small belt sander and lightly sanded the major imperfections off each board in a 4 ft area of the floor in front of our stairway.  The floor was hand stripped already (by me on my hands and knees) but wasn’t totally clean of stripper and a few areas of leftover finish.  My floorboards are uneven and need to be leveled from below but I’m doing that later.  That’s why I’m hand sanding it.  Plus I don’t want to take much off at all, I just want it clean enough to take a stain evenly.  I used 80 grit today and tomorrow I’ll run an orbital sander with 120 grit to finish it.  Then I’ll stain it when dry I’ll coat it with 3 or 4 coats of Waterlox with a day’s drying time in between each coat.  It will probably take one and a half weeks for each section before we can walk on it.  The width of the sections will be just wide enough that we can step over them.   It will save thousands of dollars by doing it myself.