January 25, 2012

Day 16

Before

What do you get when you combine a scraper, pine-sol, elbow grease, and 4 hours on hands and knees? A CLEAN floor! Hooray!!



After 


Yes it was painful at times and yes it was hard work and yes it took most of my day and no it's not perfect, but it was worth it. It looks so much better and besides the crib it's the one thing I've done in there that I am completely happy with. Maybe I'm neurotic and nobody else would care (clearly no one else did before me) but having nice floors is just important to me.
                   
Before
So how did I do it? Obviously not the professional way but it worked. Since the floors are already old and damaged I wasn't too worried about bringing up the finish a little bit, but clearly it would not have been a good idea to strip the whole floor so the first round of battle was waged against the big globs. You might think the globs would be the hardest but actually they are the easiest because I can get the edge of your scraper under them and just pop them off, no solvent required. So I took all of those up. Next it was the smaller and more spread out splotches. They don't all have as defined an edge so I had to scrape a little harder and a couple times I had to put some pine-sol on a rag and hold it over the spot for a minute to loosen it. Now all of this should equal a major improvement. However, if   you think about it those dont really draw your eye,  not like those big ole smears.



After

You know what I mean where someone tracked
paint with their barefeet or sat down with some on their butt and especially those spots where they noticed they spilled and cared just enough to do a crappy job wiping it up. Now it's full blown war. These lovely smears are snug against the grain of the wood scraping is only going to lead to scratching and you can scrub with a cloth as much as you want these babies ain't budging. So I pour a small amount  of pine-sol directly on the smear and spread it out to coat the area evenly. I let it sit a few minutes and then attack with a stiff bristle cleaning brush followed by the scraper for any stubborn spots then wipe up with a rag. All in all it's not that difficult of a process as in anyone who's willing to put in a little effort can do it. Just keep in mind there are probably better ways to do this if the integrity of your floor finish is very important to you but if you are careful this method doesn't really hurt an already less than perfect floor.

1 comment:

  1. That floor is looking good, Becky. Nice job.

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