After a terrible week in bed last week, I was finally able to get into the studio yesterday and make some progress. I originally planned to start by painting the ceiling and then work my way down. Start with the floor, cover with protective paper when finished, and paint the walls and ceiling.
I keep getting comments and messages telling me not to redo the studio floor, but it’s too late. 🙂 Already in progress and really needed to be done. After looking through the boxes that had lined the wall for years and removing the ones I no longer needed, I noticed more floor problems. . Here is an example. I don’t know what this purple object is, but he was in two different places on the floor.
Here’s another purple stain (maybe a wet ribbon?), but you can also see how some of the actual floorboards have changed color over the years. Can you see the pattern?
There were those dark boards and areas all over the floor. Over the years, I’ve learned that there’s probably no way to completely hide the tannins in red oak. At some point, no matter how much prep work you put into creating a nice, beautiful white oak floor, eventually the red oak tannins will come through and darken the finish. The floor is no longer bright and white. It was dingy with brown/amber stripes here and there.
And on the right side of the door on this side was the 2 foot by 2 foot dam I was talking about earlier. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t insignificant either. It would have been right in front of the row of cabinets leading up to the wallpapered wall.
As you can see, I started by sanding the floor using my belt sander. I concentrate most on those dirty or damaged areas, but just give the floor a proper scrape all over so that the primer has teeth to grab onto. It’s still very smooth, so you don’t want to apply the primer directly without rubbing the surface first.
In addition to the very dark streaky areas, you can also see from above how the entire floor (compare the unpolished and unpolished areas) has become totally dark. I don’t know if it’s due to the darkening of the topcoat over time or the reaction of the tannins in the floor, but the entire floor is considerably darker than it was when I finished it a few years ago.
I hope this sheds some light on why you might want to redo your floors. Some would say:I can’t believe you didn’t pay attention to the floor!’ But that’s the point. This is a studio that uses many art products such as oil paints, acrylic paints, resins, dyes, etc., and the studio floor needs to be able to withstand some abuse. You need a floor on which you can drip paints, resins, dyes, etc. That way, when things don’t turn out to your liking, you can easily fix them and make them look good again.
What’s frustrating about redoing floors is that I quickly realized I could only do half a floor at a time. Working on this side of the room right now…
This is what the other side of the room looks like…
I originally had this grand idea in my head that everything was neatly boxed up and stored somewhere and I could move the table out of the room while I worked across the floor.
Well that’s ridiculous. I am descending into this studio as the last room that needs to be completed. So we literally have nowhere to store a ton of boxes outside of this room. And then there’s the table. They are 61 inches square. The only possible way to get them out of the room is through the back French doors and under the carport. But with the weather these days (thunderstorms, hail, and tornado warnings), we don’t want our two tables outside, even under the carport.
So the only solution I could come up with was to split the floor into two parts. Work on the side you’re working on now—sand, woodfill, primer, paint—when it’s dry, cover it with protective paper, move everything to that side of the room and start working on the other side. Once that aspect is complete, the cabinets are assembled and placed, and there is a place to actually store them until the studio is complete.
It’s not ideal, but when you’re working on a DIY project, sometimes you have to deal with it and create workarounds. 😀 And I have complete confidence that it will work out in the end.
As an aside, I was able to refer to the advice I received from many people yesterday. A kind mother who read my post yesterday immediately sent me a message saying, “I’m here to help!” So she’s here today to help me put my house back together since last week. This week, we’ll be gathering at other people’s homes, so we’ll have more time here to sort things out. Yesterday morning I was stressed, but today I felt no stress at all. 🙂 And it gave me the freedom to work in my studio yesterday instead of stressing about my home.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where my husband Matt and I share our DIY and decorating journeys as we modify and decorate a 1948 Fixer upper that I bought in 2013. Do the housework yourself. You can find out more about me here.
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