Operation Floor: Seriously, Soap?

After our sudden vacation mentioned earlier, the Danish Boy returned to sanding.  Then he had to go back to work.  At his Job.  (I know, you thought that Operation Floor was his job.  So did I.  Boy is my face red!)

If you're looking at these photos and saying, gee, it looks pretty much the same as it did the last time you posted, I'd have to say SHUT UP, IT IS TOTALLY THE SAME DIFFERENT!

But only because it says so in my contract.

Anyway, a week of work (at you know, The Job, not Operation Floor), he was back at it ("it" being Operation Floor).

I could have taken photos of the floor today and posted them.  But then you definitely would have said "girl, I cannot see any difference" and the DB would have had the sads.

Can't let DB get the sads.  

Mostly because I have to listen to the whining.  *Sigh* My life.  So hard.

He rented a new machine that goes around the edges of the room and now it's almost ready for some treatment.

It will be soap.

If you are having a W.T.F. SOAP? moment, don't worry, that was my reaction.  I was all "the hell you say" and "surely you jest" because, seriously?  Soap?

And the DB was all Blah blah blah...

I assume there was explanation, but I mostly ignored it.  Primarily because my sarcasm would have gotten the best of me.  I heard something about soap being a treatment you use on the floor.  And my inner sarcasm was all "no shit, Sherlock, it sure as hell doesn't go on the wall."  The DB kept repeating himself, as if somehow saying "it's a treatment you use on the floor" multiple times would set off some association in my head "OH, a TREATMENT!  That goes on the FLOOR!  I TOTALLY understand the words that are coming out of your mouth now!"

SOAP???

I went with the idea that it was something that was called soap in Danish but had a totally different name in English.  I was thinking "maybe 'wash' like as in 'white-wash'?"  And I turned to my old friend The Google to help me out.

I tried looking up floor treatments.  Nothing about soap.  Oil, wax, shellac, yes.  Polyetheluragonnaaddmorelatinnow, but no soap.

Ha, well, there's more than one way to skin a cat... not that we skin cats around here.  'Cause if we did, Alot would be a nice foot-rest now instead of the Creature That Lurks in the Corn.  A person should be free to walk next to fields of grain without worrying that something is going to leap out and grab your ankles.  Just sayin'.

Anyway, I go to The Google.dk and do a search for floor (gulve) and soap (sæbe) and BANG, there it is.  "Soap treatment" (sæbehandling).  So I take myself back to The .com and start to type "floor soap treatment" and it suggests "you mean Danish white soap floor treatment!"

The hell you say!  It is a thing!

It's also one of those "only in Scandinavia" things and a big part of the Danish Modern movement that gives me hives.  However, just because all Danish Modern houses have this floor, does not mean that my little rustic home can't also have them.  Only, without adding the "white" coloring.

Blergh, it's the white coloring that give the Danish Modern homes that anemic, "Twighlight" watching, emo-feel.  (Which is funny, since most Danish Modern furniture is darker in color.  Darker, like the bruises I get after sitting on it for any amount of time, or the bruises I get from trying to maneuver around the pieces, or the bruised toenails I get from tripping over randomly jutting legs.  What the hell is wrong with that furniture, anyway?)

Side note: I was looking for some photo of a Danish Modern interior to nab for this blog, and I saw numerous pieces that are right out of my in-laws house.  Apparently they have a very tastefully decorated home.  And here I was thinking, gah, they really need to get rid of these ghastly pieces of furniture that are designed to hurt me!

In the end, the soap treatment sounds like a good option for the bedroom.  It's not that high traffic of an area.  It will protect the floor, leave the grain visible, be non-slippery, and it's fairly "green" - the soap is pretty much just basic soap, no mad chemicals.

I'd love to add a "self-cleaning floor" joke here, but apparently you still have to wash the floor from time to time. Gah!  NASA, get on that right now!  I want a self-cleaning floor!

The dining room, of course, being high traffic and high food-all-over-the-place-should-have-gotten-a-dog space will need something a bit more serious.  Also, it's been practically destroyed by woodworm at some point in the past (hopefully it's all in the past), so it needs some major sealing.  That'll probably get something like oil.  A thick, goopy, hardening oil.  And then I would throw a carpet over it... except for that whole food-all-over-the-place look that my child is so enthusiastic about right now.  If banana is good in the mouth, surely it is good everywhere else, right?

So no carpet.

But, we'll just tell everyone that the floor has character.  Gobs of character.  Character coming out of it's grains, it has.  Also, possibly beetles.  But beetles with character!

Operation Floor: I'm still sanding...

Okay, *I'm* not sanding, the DB is.  And he's almost done.

With the center of the floors.

Let's not talk about the perimeters.  Oh gawd, the parameters of the perimeters... meters of perimeters!

But after five! 5! FIVE! days of non-stop sanding, he's declared a vacation is in order.

A vacation from his vacation.

And since I am sick to death of scrubbing sawdust off of everything and listening to the buzzing and the sawing and the sanding, I said, "yes please" and we're going camping.

We don't know where.  Somewhere NOT HERE.

Until we get back and/or I post again, have some pictures of the cat.  He's not enjoying the floor process, Alot.

We often find Alot on the changing table.

And here's Alot in our bathroom window.

I tell you now, while sometimes I think we should have named the cat something more normal, I still get a kick out of his name... Alot.

Bwahahahaha!  Oh, the punny!  The PUNNY!!

Operation Floor: The Never-ending Sanding

Here we are, day three of the floor project (not including all the days of moving furniture).  And. We. Are. Still. Sanding.

"Master" Bedroom

Looks pretty good, right?  It damn well should, the DB has been sanding for three days.  Things we've learned about this floor?

1) The wood is fabulous.

2) It was stained and then lacquered within an inch of it's life.

3) It's warped a bit.

4) It's made of room length boards that go under the skirting board.

5) There are no nails.

Wait, no nails?  How does the damn thing stay down?  NO ONE KNOWS!!!

Other things we learned?

A) Carpet glue is an asshole.

B) Carpet glue is an asshole.

C) Carpet glue AND THE PEOPLE WHO USE IT are ASSHOLES.

So I spent Tuesday on my hands and knees, scraping glue off - not with the floor scraper one normally uses to remove softened varnish - but with a paint scraper held as a 45 degree angle.  I considered whipping out the trowel, but I worried I might start removing wood, rather than just glue and varnish, so I resisted.

Meanwhile, in the dining room...

Dining room

We've learned all about woodworm.  If we had the money, we'd just rip up the floor and lay a new one.  But if we ripped up the floor, we'd find the bare earth "foundation" our house is built over and feel the need to neoprene and insulate with foil faced fiberglass insulation, or whatever it is you do when your house is about a hundred years old and leaks heat like an unstable nuclear reactor.  But that would be $$$$$$$!!!!

So it's on to a pesticide to kill the buggers and then a thick lacquer to hold it all together for a few more years.  Eventually, we'd like to move the kitchen into this room and turn the kitchen into the dining room, so we'd be ripping up all the floors for insulation and pipe laying anyway.

But before we get to that, we obviously have to finish sanding.  It's just more of that ASSHOLE glue, old varnish and staining that has to get out of our way.  And even though it is in a bad condition, and this wood is not as fine as the wood in the bedroom, it's still made of room-length boards held down by god-only-knows.  Sheer ornery-ness?

Finally, the cat is not pleased with the disruption to his life.  He can't use his cat door, it's noisy and it smells weird.  Poor kitty!

Operation Floor: carpet removal

Because daycare was closed for vacation last week, the Danish Boy had his hands full of moving furniture while I ran around after the Spawn.

First he had to organize the garage.  I FINALLY got to label the boxes that I've spent the last few months sorting though and repacking.  Then they were stacked in an orderly fashion in the garage and I just hugged myself with glee.

Yeah, I'm a little sick.

We decided to get rid of a bedroom set.  (Pictured, hopefully, to the left.)  It was in the spare room in Ærøskøbing, but since we didn't have a spare room here, it was dismantled and placed in the garage.  Also with the set was a beautiful mirrored wardrobe (dismantled and in the garage) and a mirrored vanity that sat next to my bed.  Alas, the drawers were overly large and ungainly, so I didn't actually use if for anything other than a night stand.

Since none of it was really being used, we (I, because the DB was willing to hold on to it if I couldn't stand to be parted from my vanity... heh) decided to let it go.  Part of me is heartsick over it, but that's the hoarder side of me that keeps birthday cards from previous years stashed in drawers of my desk.  The rule of thumb here is: it must be useful and it must be pretty.  So some ugly night stands went away as well.  Night stands out of Miami Vice, they were, and so were banished to Red Cross.

All our extra furniture goes to Red Cross.  Anyone wanting to make a killing in antiques should check out Red Cross.  There's a fine collection of very old furniture there.

Slowly, but steadily he moved closets and bed into Spawn's room, dining room furniture into the garage and kitchen, and in one case, moved a closet into the mud-room where we now have to go around it to get to anything.

Well, no one is perfect.

Now the rooms looked like this:

"Master" Bedroom

Dining Room

Skanky carpet in the MB, very dirty carpet in the DR.

The carpet was peeled back and...

"Master" Bedroom

Oh, look!  Sisal.  What would posses a person to put sisal carpeting in a house?  And what would posses that person to GLUE IT TO THE FLOOR??

Dining Room

In the dining room, under the carpet, was evidence that there had been sisal glued down as well.  However, this carpet (unlike the skanky one in the MB) was laid professionally, so the sisal (and a good amount of the glue) had been removed.

Back in the MB, the sisal was attacked by a rabid Dane wielding a scraper removed.  Now, on one wall  under the bang-up wallpaper job, was evidence that there had been a wood stove in the room.  You could see the circular plug where the stove-pipe had gone into the chimney and there was a small rectangular bump where the chimney could be accessed by the chimney sweep.  So when we removed the sisal, we were only sort-of-surprised to see a zinc plate where the stove would have sat.

Can you sort of see the zinc square?

Here seen after it's removal

So now the floors are ready to be scraped... or probably just attacked by the Dane with his big sanding machine, rented from the local hardware store.  I'll be brought in for the fiddly bits, like edges and corners, that have to be done by hand.  Since the Spawn's daycare is open again and I'm toddler-free, I really don't have any excuse for not helping.

Um, I think I'm developing a pain in my... um... ugaritic bone.  Yeah, that's it.  Ugaritic bone.

Home Improvement: Operation Floor

So it's time to get to one of the major projects we have for this house.  Pull up the skanky carpet in the "master" bedroom (it's exactly the same size as the other bedroom, "master" is really a matter of opinion) and dining room.  We know that under the carpet in the bedroom is the nastiest sisal carpet EVER (which is staying something because the entryway to the apartment in Aarhus had one NASTYASS sisal carpet), but the dining room is a surprise, since the carpet is not only tacked, but glued to the floor.

I'll be taking pictures and hopefully uploading them over the coming days.

First major discovery: under the sisal carpet in the "master" bedroom, is the zinc (?) plate a stove used to sit on.  We can see the old hookup for the stove in the wall, under the wallpaper.  This must be from when our bedroom was originally a sitting room.