What is it about floors?

What is it about working on floors recently? My last post told about how the downstairs bathroom floor was done, and now I can report that the rest of the laundry room floor is now done too! Yippie! So on to the next floor! That's right, I just can't seem to get enough of working on floors. And so work began on the dining room floor today.

The plans of the dining room have changed several times over the last several months. Carpeted when we moved into the house in 1990 (I think they were - we did re-carpet most of the house after we moved in so I don't really remember if it was carpeted), Dad decided that with hardwood floors being the current fad in the housing market we would remove the carpet in the dining room and see if we could refinish the original wood floor (which actually has a very neat design to it). So we rented a sander and let the work began. The'work' lasted about ten minutes. Apparently what ever type of varnish house builders in the late 1800s used on wood floors is really good stuff and lasts a long time, cause even with the coarsest grit we had on the sander (a 20 - the lower the number, the rougher the grit for those who aren't Tim 'Tool Man' Taylor savvy), the old varnish just wouldn't come up. We even had one of the pads get so hot that it melted onto the floor. Oops.

I even ran to the hardware store and got some chemical stuff that claimed to stripe hardwood floor varnishes. Did it work? Ahhhh, nope. So, needless to say the plan to redo the hardwood floors in the dining room quickly changed to 'How much wood flooring does Menards have left (to match what we put in the kitchen and nook)?' Thus, the covering of the wood floor with wood floor now begins.