The Unwise Decisions Will Continue Until We Get Results

[roadrunnertwice]

Part two of three, continued from here.

Sidenote: Musical Beds

Obviously I wasn't sleeping in the room for the rest of this. Since I got the short end of the house, the other two shuffled things around to accomodate me; sometimes I was sleeping on the futon, and other times Schwern would give up his bed. This is mostly irrelevant until the fire alarm starts going off.

King in my World of Sawdust

You guys. Don't ever sand anything. It is a trap.

So, belt sander. Power tool. Man use machine and get shit done fast, right? It took me god damn near a month to sand that floor.

Before I bought that assload of belts, I used the 80-grit that was already on the sander to attack part of the floor, just to try and get an idea of what I was in for. I learned things:

• The floor changed color completely after being sanded for a while. It was not subtle. So there was no hope of getting away with a little touch-up on just the rough parts.
• The color change was also not instant; it took, like, a while to get the oxidized and discolored layer completely off of an area.
• Weird shit sometimes happened. Sanding a splintery part could cause more splinters to kick up. (Ominous chord.)
• Running a belt sander is surprisingly brutal on your shoulders and back. Especially if you're crouching down to do it instead of using a table.

Okay, fine, great, whatever. I got some 50-grit belts (smaller numbers are coarser) and got to work.

Thus began the age of sawdust. Sawdust everywhere. The jeans and long underwear top I wore while working would throw a cloud into the air whenever they were disturbed. The stairs were dusted with a fine layer of it. My hair smelled like it, it was packed into my skin. I am not going to show you what's left of the dust masks I was using, but I think they did a pretty good job of protecting me, at least. (And since the wood was about a hundred years old, I was pretty sure it wasn't more dangerous than any other type of abrasive particle, since they didn't start pressure treating lumber used in residences until at least the '30s.)

Doing the first pass with the 50-grit was the longest part of the process, and half the time it seemed to be making the floor worse instead of better. The way it would kick up new splinters was the worst of it.

Like, look at that. Just behold its majesty.

A splinter would get started on the side of a board, and then when I tried to cut or sand it off, it would spring up and peel off further. You know how sometimes when you're peeling loose skin on your foot and suddenly it's cutting into the live part and you're like "oh shit now what?" Wood does that too, it turns out.

(I asked someone with experience [Randall] about this later, after I was done, and he said the only good way to deal with it was with wood glue. But to make wood glue stick and mean it, you have to clamp the joint with many hundreds of pounds of force. About the only way to do that with a floor like this would have been to screw down blocks of wood and then fill in the screw holes later. This made me feel a little bit better about having made some of the gaps between boards wider, because there was just no way I was going to do that.)

The first pass with 50-grit was just the beginning, of course.

• I couldn't just sand the tops of the boards; if I didn't round off the corners of them, they would be a huge source of splinters. The only way I could think of to hit those spots was to wrap sandpaper around a block of wood and scrub between the boards with the edge of it. This was an incredible pain in the ass, and if anything kicked up MORE new splinters than the belt sander did.
• Belt sanders have a dust collecting bag, and they use the wind generated by the belt's movement to force dust up through a channel in the sander's body. This channel can get clogged up, and then there's even MORE sawdust everywhere. The first time it happened, it took me a while to figure out what had happened, and then there was like a solid layer of the shit all over the room. I think I had to take the sander apart like six times.
• The belt sander couldn't get up against the wall, so there was a ring of un-sanded floor around the edge of the room. So I had to check out a different type of power sander (a palm sander, I think it's called?) to deal with that, and it had its own pecadillos. It liked to tear up the sandpaper and get splinters stuck in it and shit. But it seemed to give a silkier finish when you put high-grit paper in it, so I ended up doing a final pass on the whole floor with it after I used the 100-grit belt.

Eventually it was done. The floor was a nice soft texture, and the splinters were gone, and it was a gorgeous light blond color.

Then I got to vacuum the walls and the seemingly infinite cracks in the floor, because FUCKING SAWDUST, ARGH.

That Shop Class High

And then I huffed a whole shitload of paint thinner fumes.

Tung oil is pretty thick. This doesn't square well with the fact that you want it distributed evenly and soaked partway into the wood -- for that to happen, it has to be a lot runnier and smoother. So obviously the thing to do is to mix it with something with very low viscosity and which dissolves oil, but which evaporates completely once everything is spread out, leaving only that perfect amount of oil behind.

Every substance that matches that description is horrible.

I got started with the poisonfest a little early, because even after vacuuming everything, I was pretty sure there was still a fine layer of sawdust where I wanted to put oil, and I needed it gone before I started. I couldn't sweep it up with a wet rag, though, because the water would soak right into the wood and repel the oil I wanted in there. Randall at work suggested using a rag with mineral spirits, which would capture dust the same way, but which would evaporate fast enough to not be retained by the wood. Note that things that evaporate fast are generally not great for you. So okay, that worked, even though it smelled pretty gnarly and left me a little lightheaded. Then it was time to get started on the oil.

Tung oil is pretty neat. You can kind of see it glomming onto and into the wood as you go. It has its own color, which merges with the color of the wood; in the case of this light pine, it added up to a rich dark reddish blond. I'm told it gets richer with age, too.

Mind you, I didn't do the full sort of treatment you'd do on a real hardwood floor, the kind that adds up to a solid gloss sheen that you can slide on. It didn't seem appropriate or necessary. I hit it with three coats of the sealer over the course of a week or so, which added up to a nice matte water-resistant finish I was pretty happy with.

(I had to avoid the otherwise-obvious celebratory beer for that entire week, though, because apparently mixing thinner fumes and alcohol can kill you or make your organs self-destruct or something.)

Like a Beep in the Night

Okay, we still don't really know what this was about or what alchemy was involved, but drying tung oil can cause certain smoke detectors to go off.

We discovered this at four AM.

The night after I finished the second coat of oil, I was sleeping in Schwern's room, since he had graciously swapped with me and taken the futon. This meant I was the furthest one from the alarm, ha.

I woke confused, with that pressing but indefinable sense that something was very, very, extremely wrong. I heard footsteps elsewhere in the house, and some grating sound that was just under the threshold of being identifiable. Then I opened the door and went "OH." I ran upstairs, where Schwern and Nóirín had already gathered.

Nothing was on fire, thank god. There was no haze in the room. There's a distinctive smell to curing tung oil once the paint thinner has all vaporized (it smells nutty and delicious, even though uncured tung is poison to humans), and it was pretty thick in there, but it wasn't at all smokelike. We all stayed very confused and unhappy and annoyed. Plus it was obviously my fault somehow, so I felt pretty guilty about explosively waking the rest of the house.

(Oh, and the smoke detectors in my room and Nóirín's are linked somehow, so hers starts screaming as soon as mine does. That's a great feature, except for the fact that it meant she always got it right in the ear during this string of false alarms.)

This is the point where I have to explain the ventilation and weather situations. Obviously I had the window open and a pair of fans running while I was treating the floor, because I was only down with getting a little bit poisoned. But this was in February and it was cold as hell outside, so once I was done, I closed the bedroom door and left one fan on low, in the hope of keeping things circulating through the window without draining all the warm air from the entire house.

So then I had to drain all the warm air from the entire house. I tried my best to avoid it! After swinging the fans around and making the beepers stop, I turned both fans on high but left the door closed, hoping that would do it. The alarms started howling again within ten minutes. Awesome. So then I gave up and set up a proper wind tunnel. I think we moved Nóirín into Schwern's room (the farthest from the wind tunnel) with a space heater because cold affects her more; Schwern took her room, and I slept on the futon with a mountain of extra blankets.

This didn't recur the next night, even after I shut the door and turned the fans back down. Okay, cool, I figured that was it. After I did the third coat, I made sure to leave both fans on high for multiple nights, and was able to get away with leaving the door shut. Then we had a spontaneous complete repeat of this slapstick like four nights after I finished the third coat! (Complete with progressively increasing the air flow through like four alarms, in the hope of avoiding the full wind tunnel. I promise I can usually learn from mistakes, just not so much at four in the morning when a malfunctioning robot is screaming in my ear.)

So, in conclusion, what the ever-loving fuck? No one knows. I called Woodcrafters, who I'd bought the tung from, and they hadn't a clue, but they told me Sutherland-Welles is basically like two people or something, and suggested I call the owners and see if they had anything to say. I did! They didn't. They've been selling the stuff for years and had never heard of anything like this.

That leaves us with nothing but wild surmise, but at least I'm pretty good at that. I figure it went like this:

Like I mentioned above, tung oil dries by oxidizing, and it oxidizes exothermically. So to oversimplify a bit, that means it's basically burning in very slow motion. It's removing oxygen from the air, and offgassing... something. Possibly some CO2 and CO; probably some weirder and more complicated stuff too. (Whatever the components of that nutty smell were.)

Now, we're pretty sure the smoke detector wasn't a combined CO detector. It didn't have identifying markings of any kind on it, and there was a proper CO detector out on the landing between my room and Nóirín's, which we figure wouldn't have been installed if they'd had double-duty ones already. But it's possible that it had a secondary CO or CO2 sensor to beef up its fire detecting abilities, and if that's the case it was probably a good thing it was going off and making our lives hell.

But in reading up on how radioactive smoke detectors work, I had another thought, which is that maybe some of the complicated aromatic nutty-smelling molecules were capable of absorbing and neutralizing either the positive or negative ions and disrupting the detector's current. They're probably less efficient at that than smoke, though, so that would only work with a fairly sensitive detector and a very small room, which might account for how the manufacturer had never heard of it happening before. If this was the case, the gas was... probably harmless, and I bet we could have gotten away with disconnecting the alarm.

As for the delay after the third coat, I think it was all about temperature. The third coat was thicker, so it didn't all get to the gassy part of the curing right away, and then the weather got a tiny bit warmer a few days after I finished it. Once the room was warmer and I turned the fans down, the tung was able to generate a lot more of... whatever gas, and build up enough to flip the alarm again.

But that's just a guess, and everyone is still completely mystified.

NEXT TIME:

Everything is pink. Why oh why is everything pink.

Comments

[kamonohashi]

Noooooooooooo you have only posted 2/3 parts! Now I have to go to sleep! On a cliffhanger!

[roadrunnertwice]

World's first cliffhanger about paint! Or no, come to think of it, I think Steven Brust got there first. Damn.

[grrlpup]

I love this story! There should be consoling chapbooks or comics just like this available at hardware stores for people in the throes of similar projects. (Fortunately, my own floor saga is about 16 years in the past.)

[roadrunnertwice]

RoomQuest: The Comic would mostly consist of me making D: or -_- faces, I suspect. But Ryan was urging me to do something more with this earlier today, so maybe I'll make it a zine or something! We'll see.

[foxfirefey]

I am loving these posts so much.

[roadrunnertwice]

Aw, thanks! I admit to having kept myself going with "Well, it'll at least make a good story later."