A False Sense of Security
Although the terminator boot was turning me into an insomniac who was watching entire series on TV in one sitting and eventually falling asleep just as the sun was coming up, it did allow me to dispense with the crutches and and walk around a bit more. Cooking became a non wheeled activity, being able to use both hands...at the same time...whilst standing up, makes everything easier.
I may have mentioned in a previous post that we had a double glazing firm come round and in a fit of madness I decided to get a new window in the sitting room. I did this on my own whilst Helen was at the gym. When she went out we had just told the man very politely that we didn't need any new windows, when she came back I had spent £2000 on a new window. To be fair it was a completely new window, as in, they had to cut a new hole in the wall to fit it.
It's all very well ordering new windows, basically because you are bored, but it has unforeseen consequences, in my case it precipitated the most frantic round of DIY that the world has ever seen. Once the window was fitted, the dust hoovered up and the roughly 7 million polystyrene balls painstakingly removed from between the floorboards by hand. I kid you not, we live in a 1970's house and the cavity insulation consists of expanded polystyrene balls. When you cut a sodding great hole in the wall they come pouring out in copious quantities and immediately lodge themselves in the gaps between the floorboards.
"Nae problemo" I hear you cry, "Just hoover the little buggers up"
This would have been a wise and sensible course of action if the bloody things would consent to leaving their cozy niche in the floorboards...they wouldn't, in fact the only way to get the fucking things out was for Helen to flick them out with a knife and me to follow along with the hoover to make sure they didn't immediately run away and hide in yet another floorboard gap.
Still, not too onerous a job, all we need to do is slap some emulsion around the window and put the furniture back. Apparently not, this eminently sane suggestion is given the firm "Nolle prosequi" by my wife...sorry, sorry, but it's the only way that I can look vaguely intelligent. Nay and thrice nay, apparently we have to remove all the furniture and sand the floor first. It was no good me wailing
"But, but, we've had the window done not the floor"
This was about as effective as King Canute and his paddling routine, standing firm in the face of a tide of connubial decorating will only end one way...it's better to go with the flow and avoid serious injury. However I have an advantage in this particular scenario, I am a bona fide cripple, I don't walk I hobble and then possibly fall over or go back to bed. I cannot partake in this floor sanding madness as I still have a foot encased in a terminator boot hell bent on ensuring I never sleep again.
Helen and I have sanded numerous floors including the entire ground floor of our current house, it's always a division of labour, I've always done the floorboards with a drum sander that tries to launch you through the nearest window and Helen has always done the edges with the spinny sander that is very good at cutting through copper heating pipes...but that may be a story for another day.
About a year or so ago I got fed up with the carpet in my office, that the dog had decided to use as a urinal, and made up my mind that it had to go. The office is the room that I have been sleeping in for the last 3 months. Helen is not very interested in the office due to it's distinct male ambience and the presence of about a thousand books which means Helen couldn't really let herself go in the decorating stakes. So I ended up doing this one on my own and I had sanded the floor in one day and this lulled me into a false sense of security.
We have sanded many floors together and the one thing they all had in common is that they had never been sanded before. So, quick lesson, if you are going to sand a floor that just has standard floorboards, especially old ones, then you need to get the floor flat. You accomplish this by using a very coarse grade of sandpaper and sanding the floor diagonally, keep going for long enough and eventually you'll get a flat floor. Unless of course you leave the drum sander in one place too long and then you will get a floor that resembles the waves of the sea. You then use finer and finer grades of sandpaper until the floor is smooth.
What Helen and I have never done is redone a floor that we have previously sanded. This makes life considerably easier as you have already got the floor flat and all you need to do is use the finest grade of sandpaper and provide a key for your new varnish to stick to. This also meant that Helen would be able to do this on her own with me providing moral support and guidance from the sidelines or occasionally the bed.
The difference between the office and the sitting room is one of scale, the office is, frankly, tiny and the sitting room is quite large. To be honest once the furniture is removed it appears to be fucking enormous, but still, not a problem, we are only lightly sanding the top of the varnish to provide a key.
I took two days off work in the middle of the week to provide the necessary moral support and guidance to Helen who was the prime mover in this sanding insanity.
On the appointed day Helen disappeared to the hire shop and came back with the sanders, jeez..I'd forgotten how heavy these things are. We finally heaved them into the sitting room and I proceeded to give Helen a lesson on the floor sander. We attached the finest grade of sandpaper and I did one pass up and down the floor to show her how it was done. Hmm, the floor was not as flat as I was expecting. Then Helen had a go and we were off, I returned to my bed as this was the limit of my involvement, but not for long. There was a despairing cry from the living room and I returned to find Helen had produced her first dent in the floor. She kept stopping at the end of each pass and the sander promptly took advantage of this to provide us with a beautiful dent in our otherwise pristine floor, if this carried on then small children were going to become sea sick whilst bum shuffling across the floor.
I took over to give another demonstration and although I wasn't producing dents, the floor was looking distinctly un-sanded, to be honest it was looking more smeared than sanded. I had been duped, it was obvious that Helen was not going to be doing the floor sanding so I manfully stepped up to the plate...and proceeded to fuck it up royally. Oh I didn't produce any of the aforementioned waves but I was singularly failing to sand the fucking thing as well. We spent that entire day trying different grades of sandpaper with varying levels of failure. It wasn't elegantly providing a nice key to add varnish to, it was either removing some varnish completely or somehow smearing it across the floor.
Towards the end of the day we were having slightly more luck with a coarser grade of sandpaper but I was unutterably knackered and all we had accomplished was a floor that looked, to be frank, utterly shit. Something had to be done.
The next morning I commanded Helen to return to the hire shop and purchase further quantities of the slightly coarser grade of paper whilst I would return to the job of sanding the floor. It was no good, it just wasn't working. I gave up and changed the paper for nearly the coarsest grade and started sanding diagonally, it worked, of course it fucking worked, that's how you are supposed to sand a floor using one of these evil bastarding machines. What you aren't supposed to do is try to provide a light key, 'cos that is not how these bloody things work and if I had used even a fraction of common sense I would have realised this.
Now I was stuck, there was no way on God's green earth that Helen would be able to wrestle this bloody thing across the floor whilst not making it resemble the Mendip Hills. It required constant movement and...remember I've been lying in a bed for near on three months...parts of me that I didn't even know existed were beginning to hurt. The foot was in a state of shock:
"Hoy, you up there, what do think you're doing, You do realise this is fucking painful, you're supposed to be convalescing not covering me in sawdust"
"Yes, yes, I know, just shut up and put up with it, this is marital DIY and no complaints from you are going to cut it"
So that's what we did, I shuffled up and down roughly 150 acres of floorboards for about 12 hours until the fucking thing was sanded. Anxiously followed by Helen either with a hoover or asking whether she should do it. Not a chance, you needed shoulders like a mountain gorilla to keep that bloody thing moving and it just wasn't going to happen. Helen manfully stepped up to do the edge sanding, which I have to say is not an easy job... quick tip don't go near any copper heating pipes... and I continued my interminable wrestling match.
By the way I don't have shoulders like a mountain gorilla, I don't even have shoulders like a moderately fit middle aged man, I have the shoulders of a computer nerd. What I do have is a certain bloodymindedness that in this situation substituted for actual strength or fitness, by the end of the day it was all done but I felt like I had done about 24 rounds with Mike Tyson, mind you the pain in my back and shoulders by that time had fully eclipsed the foot.
It was, however, done, I poured the sawdust out of my terminator boot and collapsed onto the bed, unfortunately for Helen the nightmare was just beginning as she now faced the task of cleaning and varnishing the floor, not only was I completely spent but I'd only taken off 2 days holiday, the next day I was back at work. I have never been so pleased to be back at work in my life.
I may have mentioned in a previous post that we had a double glazing firm come round and in a fit of madness I decided to get a new window in the sitting room. I did this on my own whilst Helen was at the gym. When she went out we had just told the man very politely that we didn't need any new windows, when she came back I had spent £2000 on a new window. To be fair it was a completely new window, as in, they had to cut a new hole in the wall to fit it.
It's all very well ordering new windows, basically because you are bored, but it has unforeseen consequences, in my case it precipitated the most frantic round of DIY that the world has ever seen. Once the window was fitted, the dust hoovered up and the roughly 7 million polystyrene balls painstakingly removed from between the floorboards by hand. I kid you not, we live in a 1970's house and the cavity insulation consists of expanded polystyrene balls. When you cut a sodding great hole in the wall they come pouring out in copious quantities and immediately lodge themselves in the gaps between the floorboards.
"Nae problemo" I hear you cry, "Just hoover the little buggers up"
This would have been a wise and sensible course of action if the bloody things would consent to leaving their cozy niche in the floorboards...they wouldn't, in fact the only way to get the fucking things out was for Helen to flick them out with a knife and me to follow along with the hoover to make sure they didn't immediately run away and hide in yet another floorboard gap.
Still, not too onerous a job, all we need to do is slap some emulsion around the window and put the furniture back. Apparently not, this eminently sane suggestion is given the firm "Nolle prosequi" by my wife...sorry, sorry, but it's the only way that I can look vaguely intelligent. Nay and thrice nay, apparently we have to remove all the furniture and sand the floor first. It was no good me wailing
"But, but, we've had the window done not the floor"
This was about as effective as King Canute and his paddling routine, standing firm in the face of a tide of connubial decorating will only end one way...it's better to go with the flow and avoid serious injury. However I have an advantage in this particular scenario, I am a bona fide cripple, I don't walk I hobble and then possibly fall over or go back to bed. I cannot partake in this floor sanding madness as I still have a foot encased in a terminator boot hell bent on ensuring I never sleep again.
Helen and I have sanded numerous floors including the entire ground floor of our current house, it's always a division of labour, I've always done the floorboards with a drum sander that tries to launch you through the nearest window and Helen has always done the edges with the spinny sander that is very good at cutting through copper heating pipes...but that may be a story for another day.
About a year or so ago I got fed up with the carpet in my office, that the dog had decided to use as a urinal, and made up my mind that it had to go. The office is the room that I have been sleeping in for the last 3 months. Helen is not very interested in the office due to it's distinct male ambience and the presence of about a thousand books which means Helen couldn't really let herself go in the decorating stakes. So I ended up doing this one on my own and I had sanded the floor in one day and this lulled me into a false sense of security.
We have sanded many floors together and the one thing they all had in common is that they had never been sanded before. So, quick lesson, if you are going to sand a floor that just has standard floorboards, especially old ones, then you need to get the floor flat. You accomplish this by using a very coarse grade of sandpaper and sanding the floor diagonally, keep going for long enough and eventually you'll get a flat floor. Unless of course you leave the drum sander in one place too long and then you will get a floor that resembles the waves of the sea. You then use finer and finer grades of sandpaper until the floor is smooth.
What Helen and I have never done is redone a floor that we have previously sanded. This makes life considerably easier as you have already got the floor flat and all you need to do is use the finest grade of sandpaper and provide a key for your new varnish to stick to. This also meant that Helen would be able to do this on her own with me providing moral support and guidance from the sidelines or occasionally the bed.
I took two days off work in the middle of the week to provide the necessary moral support and guidance to Helen who was the prime mover in this sanding insanity.
On the appointed day Helen disappeared to the hire shop and came back with the sanders, jeez..I'd forgotten how heavy these things are. We finally heaved them into the sitting room and I proceeded to give Helen a lesson on the floor sander. We attached the finest grade of sandpaper and I did one pass up and down the floor to show her how it was done. Hmm, the floor was not as flat as I was expecting. Then Helen had a go and we were off, I returned to my bed as this was the limit of my involvement, but not for long. There was a despairing cry from the living room and I returned to find Helen had produced her first dent in the floor. She kept stopping at the end of each pass and the sander promptly took advantage of this to provide us with a beautiful dent in our otherwise pristine floor, if this carried on then small children were going to become sea sick whilst bum shuffling across the floor.
I took over to give another demonstration and although I wasn't producing dents, the floor was looking distinctly un-sanded, to be honest it was looking more smeared than sanded. I had been duped, it was obvious that Helen was not going to be doing the floor sanding so I manfully stepped up to the plate...and proceeded to fuck it up royally. Oh I didn't produce any of the aforementioned waves but I was singularly failing to sand the fucking thing as well. We spent that entire day trying different grades of sandpaper with varying levels of failure. It wasn't elegantly providing a nice key to add varnish to, it was either removing some varnish completely or somehow smearing it across the floor.
Towards the end of the day we were having slightly more luck with a coarser grade of sandpaper but I was unutterably knackered and all we had accomplished was a floor that looked, to be frank, utterly shit. Something had to be done.
The next morning I commanded Helen to return to the hire shop and purchase further quantities of the slightly coarser grade of paper whilst I would return to the job of sanding the floor. It was no good, it just wasn't working. I gave up and changed the paper for nearly the coarsest grade and started sanding diagonally, it worked, of course it fucking worked, that's how you are supposed to sand a floor using one of these evil bastarding machines. What you aren't supposed to do is try to provide a light key, 'cos that is not how these bloody things work and if I had used even a fraction of common sense I would have realised this.
Now I was stuck, there was no way on God's green earth that Helen would be able to wrestle this bloody thing across the floor whilst not making it resemble the Mendip Hills. It required constant movement and...remember I've been lying in a bed for near on three months...parts of me that I didn't even know existed were beginning to hurt. The foot was in a state of shock:
"Hoy, you up there, what do think you're doing, You do realise this is fucking painful, you're supposed to be convalescing not covering me in sawdust"
"Yes, yes, I know, just shut up and put up with it, this is marital DIY and no complaints from you are going to cut it"
So that's what we did, I shuffled up and down roughly 150 acres of floorboards for about 12 hours until the fucking thing was sanded. Anxiously followed by Helen either with a hoover or asking whether she should do it. Not a chance, you needed shoulders like a mountain gorilla to keep that bloody thing moving and it just wasn't going to happen. Helen manfully stepped up to do the edge sanding, which I have to say is not an easy job... quick tip don't go near any copper heating pipes... and I continued my interminable wrestling match.
By the way I don't have shoulders like a mountain gorilla, I don't even have shoulders like a moderately fit middle aged man, I have the shoulders of a computer nerd. What I do have is a certain bloodymindedness that in this situation substituted for actual strength or fitness, by the end of the day it was all done but I felt like I had done about 24 rounds with Mike Tyson, mind you the pain in my back and shoulders by that time had fully eclipsed the foot.
It was, however, done, I poured the sawdust out of my terminator boot and collapsed onto the bed, unfortunately for Helen the nightmare was just beginning as she now faced the task of cleaning and varnishing the floor, not only was I completely spent but I'd only taken off 2 days holiday, the next day I was back at work. I have never been so pleased to be back at work in my life.
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