Even after we dug the floors out from their various 70's-era prison cells, they certainly weren't restored to their Victorian glory... yet.
On Wednesday, April 11, that all changed. That morning, a company called Mr. Sandless showed up to give our 100-year old floors a facelift that would make even Joan Rivers jealous.
As you may have guessed from the name "Mr. Sandless", the refinishing process was done without kicking up mountains of sawdust in our house. The process was done completely with chemicals that -- it's safe to say -- should be kept out of reach of small children.
According to one of workers (who is a carpenter by trade), our floors are made of "heart pine". He said that these days, heart pine floors are only found in old homes. And that if we wanted to put a new floor in our home made from heart pine, we could expect to pay an arm and a leg (actually, more like 2 arms and 3 legs, plus a kidney or two.) Needless to say, we were very glad that restoring our heart pine floors didn't cost nearly as much. In fact, it cost us about 1/3 of what we would have paid to have the floors resanded, and took about 1/4 of the time, with 1/10,000 of the mess.
The crew from Mr. Sandless was a little skeptical about whether their chemical process would be able to pull up most of the leftover debris on the floors. They were especially nervous about all the glue on the dining room floor, leftover from the linoleum.
As you can tell from the finished product, those chemicals got the job done better than any of the crew -- not to mention the two of us -- could have imagined.
Sadly, Mr. Sandless wasn't able to do anything about the black crud in our upstairs hallway. And we'll have to sand the oak staircase the old fashioned way. But they managed to make all the other rooms look amazing: all four bedrooms, the living room and especially the dining room.
After at least 30 years of nightmarish carpet and linoleum, our old Victorian finally has floors it can be proud of again.
