What I Did With my Winter

[roadrunnertwice]

So, shit may have gotten a little out of hand with this bedroom situation. Shit may have also gotten out of hand with the post about said bedroom situation. (Part one of three!)

The last time I talked about this here was in January, and just... wow. That is a post by a very different Nick, his face unlined by suffering. I kind of want to give him a hug; poor bastard has no fucking idea what he's in for.

Here is how it happened.

---

The "Before" Photo

So yeah. Meet my room.

This is how it looked when I moved in. Let us count the HELL NO:

• The carpet. This was the only carpet in the entire house, and it was horrid. Note despair-inducing anti-color. Note revolting stains.
• The walls. What the FUCK were they thinking? (Foreshadowing: I think I figured this out.) It may actually be the worst shade of green I have ever seen deliberately applied to something. It's preternaturally stomach-churning. It's the kind of shade a bored and hateful administrator would put up in the visiting room at a juvenile detention center. It ran my anxiety levels through the roof whenever I was in the room. I think the fact that I had to leave painting for last may have actually made other steps of this process harder simply by this color's ability to induce panic and misery.
• The trim. The unpainted color of the woodwork in the rest of the house (natural or stained, I'm not sure) is a rich reddish brown. Someone had tried to pick a paint shade that would emulate that, but they failed to jump the uncanny valley, and it just looked plasticky and wrong.
• The light switch cover (not pictured yet). Well, okay, I admit I overreacted here. We'll get back to this later.

But like I said in the previous post, the rest of the house is and was beautiful. (Get me started on the box beams in the living room sometime.) It really just had the one room that was a problem. And there are many rooms that are problems, but this one was mine.

Refusing the Call

I was resigned to keeping the carpet, and figured I would just be painting the room. I also figured picking a color would be a few days' work, and that I could get the thing painted in mid-December, give it time to dry and cure, and move all the way into a finished room right before Christmas. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Anyway, I got a bunch of paint chips from Miller and stuck them to the wall and stopped in every day to contemplate them before work. That obviously counts for something.

Note the ill-advised prevalence of orange. This was because I was insane.

I was starting to have an anxious freakout about my inability to decide on a color, and then Nóirín talked me down and convinced me to just move in and leave it 'til after Christmas.

Destroy Everything

Once I chilled out about the paint for a minute, I went up to Oly for Christmas break and told a bunch of friends and family about the new house. In the process, I had an epiphany: Fuck carpet. For real, I am just done with it. I barely even cared what was under it at this point. So I emailed the landlord's agent and got permission to yank it, then emailed again and got permission to treat the reputedly unfinished wood flooring with something unspecified. I did not see fit to mention that I have absolutely zero home improvement experience. I mean, how hard could it be, right? :|

Carpet removal was horrible. I mean, getting the carpet itself up was fine. You can start it with your fingers and just pull. But it turns out that carpet stays in place because of a shitload of nailed-down boards with tacks sticking up out of them. Did you know that? I didn't know that.

And then it turns out that foam carpet pad stays in place because someone has fucking driven a thousand goddamn industrial staples into the floor.

Violence was unavoidable. I went to the hardware store, bought an attractive yellow crowbar and a pair of pliers, and proceeded to blow something shy of a week of my life prying up Hellraiser slats and pulling staples. (This was not like pulling staples out of a wall. I had to grip 'em, bend my knees, and WRENCH. Sometimes they broke off, and I had to use dull wirecutters to re-grip and lever out the sharp little stub.)

I do not plan to ever do this again.

But I did do it.

The Floor Was in a Fuck of a State

The floor was in a fuck of a state.

I moved my mattress back in for a week, after I got all the schmutz and carpet dust vacuumed up. Planning my next move, and stuff. Somewhere in there, we had a bit of a housewarming party, and I got some other people's thoughts about paint colors. (Big thanks to everyone who walked me back from throwing a bunch of insane orange up there, especially jemale. That would have been a terrible idea.)

After testing out the floor as it was, I decided I couldn't just leave it be. It was pretty splintery.

PRO:

• Man, check out that lovely dark aging on it!
• Not carpet.

CON:

• Nasty discoloration from all the times someone spilled something through the carpet.
• Totally brutalized by staples and nails, so lots of cracks and pointy bits.
• ...And a bunch of areas that were just splintering and poking out on their own account. Being splintered before being splintered got cool. Basically, the wood had never been treated with anything, and was probably never meant to be exposed. Foot sliver city.
• Big gaps between a bunch of the boards. Like, lose a key or a USB stick type gaps.

So... no.

Anyway, here was the problem: This was not a proper hardwood floor. It was soft pine or fir, and it was gappy end-nailed boards. Most indoor wood floors are fit together with a "tongue-and-groove" system of pre-cut pieces, so that you can get a nice level gapless surface, and this was the opposite of that. It was more like an indoor deck. Which meant that all the advice out there for dealing with a hardwood floor turned out to just not obtain, and the advice for decks didn't really fit with an indoor lifestyle. But I started to come up with a plan:

• I was going to have to sand it to deal with the roughness and splinters, and it was going to suck, because the big standing disc sanders they use on real hardwood floors wouldn't work here. (Actually, I'm not completely positive about this anymore. If I were to do this again, I'd investigate further. [Note: I will never do this again.])
• Instead of treating the boards with polyurethane or whatever, I was going to seal them with tung oil. I don't remember why this appealed to me so much -- it certainly wasn't on account of being all-natural or whatever, because applying it involves huffing a LOT of paint thinner. Magical thinking, probably. (Spoiler: this turned out to be a good idea in spite of my jackassery. Eventually.)
• And as for the gaps? ROPE. No seriously. Pure genius. I'm pretty sure this is the thread where I first encountered that idea. Anyway, ROPE: it would fill the gaps, even the huge ones, and it would totally cement the treehouse aesthetic I was reaching for.

All right, cool, that looked kind of like a list of fetch quests. I can do those.

Rope Quest

Uh, where does rope come from, anyway? Like, thick natural fiber rope. Boat rope. I was pretty sure I'd never seen it at Fred Meyer, and Next Adventure and REI only stock modern synthetic ropes meant for climbers. How the hell did I nearly reach 30 without knowing where to go when I need rope? What the fuck kind of sailor am I, anyway? So I asked Twitter.

I got some very well-intentioned replies, and I now know several sources in the Pacific Northwest for nice-smelling rope that feels soft and won't chafe too badly or leave splinters. (Ladies.) I also learned that I can save a lot of people (including myself) a lot of awkward blushing if I mention WHY I'm looking for rope in the first place. So, that happened.

Anyway, it turns out the answer for workmanlike manila rope is the Pope Rigging Loft, in industrial Northwest Portland.

It was butch enough in there to raise real questions about how I got to be such a sissy. Heavy presses. Men in construction gear loitering manfully. 1" steel cable rope harnesses for god only knows what. Spools of cable the size of a Honda. Hand-painted sign from the '80s explaining that OSHA says you can't go in the back. You get the idea. And then I rolled in on my little bicycle and asked for a mere twenty feet of manila. "You have some marine project you gonna use this for?" asked the guy. Nope, just indulging my nesting instinct.

They sold me some rope, though!

FUN FACT: Manila is shitloads better than hemp for marine applications. Hemp will retain moisture in its core and rot out while feeling dry on the outside, which will make it snap unpredictably at basically the worst possible time. You have to treat it with tar to be able to use it on a boat, and they used to do that and it sucked. Manila, on the other hand, will dry all the way out, which made it the sailor's choice.

Tung Quest

The fuck is tung oil, anyway? Well! It is a "drying oil," which polymerizes into a hard plasticky finish on contact with air. It comes from a Chinese nut.

You can get it uncut, notably from these guys, but if you just smear it on like that it'll basically never properly cure. You have to mix it with a volatile solvent, so it'll soak into the grain, spread more evenly, and dry at a reasonable speed. Also, it helps if you can find the "polymerized" pre-cooked substance, which purportedly dries faster and cures harder.

The traditional method is to mix it yourself with steadily decreasing amounts of solvent for each coat. Sutherland Welles sells a line of pre-mixed polymerized tung, and I went with their plain-old "sealer" mix. You can get it at Woodcrafters in Portland. (Spoiler: I ultimately did not bother moving on to their more finish-like mixes, which I think have some kind of resin mixed in.)

The sealer blend cost $40 for a quart, but the quart did the trick for three coats over the whole room.

FUN FACT: Tung oil and linseed oil don't really "dry" like a water-based fluid does. They harden by oxidizing!

LESS THAN FUN FACT: That oxidation is an exothermic reaction. If you have a pile of oil-soaked rags that don't have a lot of air flow, they can spontaneously combust!

This may or may not be related to something that happened later. We're still really not sure.

Sand Quest

Problem: I do not own a power sander.

Solution: Northeast Portland Tool Library! Yes, that's right: you can just go check out power tools. It is not even a big deal. So cool. Salute to Jessica for tipping me off. They're open on Wednesday nights and most of the day Saturday, in the basement of that church at like 20-something-th and Killingsworth.

So I checked out a belt sander and one of those rubber sandpaper-gripper-hand-sander thingies. (And also eventually a power palm sander.)

They didn't have a whole lot of belt selection just sitting around, so I had to hit the hardware store and buy some belts. It's cool, whatever, I had to buy some dust masks too.

HELPFUL HINT: Bring an example belt to the hardware store when you're buying belts. They come in different sizes! I had not realized this, so I went ahead and just guessed at what size I needed.

HELPFUL HINT FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T TAKE THE FIRST HELPFUL HINT: If you don't know what size belt to get, get them all and just return the extras later. Because you will guess the wrong size, so you are making at least two hardware store trips no matter what.

I did not take either of these hints.

NEXT TIME:

Mysterious 4AM smoke alarms. And lots and lots of sawdust.

Comments

[foxfirefey]

metaquotes?

[roadrunnertwice]

Sure!

[zdashamber]

Hi! Came over from Metaquotes, and added you because I am curious about the rest of the story and would otherwise forget. Also I know people in Portland? And Oakland has a tool lending library, too, and I agree that they are awesome.

[roadrunnertwice]

They're the shit! I had a bit of a kid-in-candy-shop moment in there. I can drill things without waiting for my parents' next visit! (Also hi and welcome.)

[azurelunatic]

This is a truly epic story. Also here via metaquotes. I can say from experience that the sort of splinters you get from boards that were not meant to be floor (plywood with rolling office chairs, anyone?) are not any kind of fun, and sort of suck when you randomly faint onto them from forgetting to breathe after getting up from the computer (again). (My teenage years were full of excitement and danger.)

[roadrunnertwice]

It definitely FELT epic. When I finally become a god of the underworld, I'm gonna make my petitioners run a belt sander for weeks on a floor that keeps generating more splinters. That, and drink a whole shit-ton of sheep's blood.