And A Pecan Tree: Sand Man

Now, the fun part! Friday morning, Greg drove on over to Lowes, picked up the 200+ lb beast and got to work sanding all of the finish, ancient mastic, and water and, gross, pet stains up off the hardwoods. I joined him around 11 when I was able to pass Zach off to my mom. Vacuuming with Zach is a challenge, I can't imagine him chasing the sander around trying to jump on it for a ride . . . that and all the dust not being a great environment for baby lungs.

This is Greg sanding Zach's room. It took a little over an hour to sand that room (about 120 square feet). We had to stop the machine every 15 minutes or so to check the sand pads and scrape off any melted wood filler from the previous finish, empty the dust catcher or replace the sand pads.

Look at that! All the junk came right up!

Changing out the sanding pads . . . which we had to do every 20-30 min as they would wear down.

My turn . . . much more fun than scooting around on your knees sanding the edges with a palm sander, though I did my fair share of that, too.

It took us a good 9 hours to do the first round of sanding with the 36 grit sand paper. It was certainly slow, but effective.

We took a break for dinner, transferred Zach from one set of grandparents to the other, and ran by Lowe's for a few things (including a work lamp for the living room since there's no overhead lighting in that room) then got back to work around 8. We had the machine for a 24 hour rental and hoped to power through the next 2 rounds of sanding (50 and 80 grit) by morning so we could return the machine by 7am and also start staining the next morning.

Our friend Topher came back by to help with same sanding around the edges for a couple hours, and then it was down to this . . .

Greg passing over the living room with some of the finer grits. This was the hardest part because you couldn't see the change, you could certainly feel it, but it was difficult to track your progress moving around the room.

I knew it was getting late but I told Greg not to tell me what time it was. I kept trying to convince myself it was only about 10 . . . together we went through half a case of Mountain Dew, more soda in one night than in the past year!

We finally finished up at 4. Yea, 4. We cleaned up, powered everything off, loaded the sander in the car and went home to sleep for an hour or so. We got all the sanding done before the return time though, success!

And when we made it back to the house the next morning we saw this: