The thermometer on the landing said 19°C at 6.55am on Wednesday 23 July, which should have told us everything. By Thursday afternoon the phone said 31°C in the garden, and the front bedroom, with a pale haze hanging in the light from the open window, felt like a floury oven. This was the first day of Matt's summer holiday, the day he had been looking forward to since February, and it began with a drum sander and a plastic sheet taped over a door.
Getting the room ready
The old carpet had come up in June. It had been down since about 1997, to judge by the smell, and the underlay turned to orange crumbs the moment we touched it. Pulling out the gripper rods was easy. Pulling out the staples was not, and I counted 412 of them because it was either that or cry. Then every nail head in every board was punched below the surface with a nail punch, about 3 mm down, because a drum sander that meets a proud nail will cheerfully ruin both the belt and your afternoon.
I put a note through Maureen's door warning her about the noise. She stopped me at the gate the next morning. "Ron sanded ours in 1981. I went to my sister's for the weekend." She stayed at home, in the end, and said afterwards that it had sounded like a very large wasp.
Three days, 31°C
The hire shop was on the far side of the city. Kev drove Matt over to collect everything on Tuesday evening, and the two of them carried the sander up our stairs as though it were a sofa that didn't want to go. The drum sander does the main work: 40 grit across the boards on a diagonal to flatten them, 60 along the grain, then 100 for the finish. An edger does the strip round the walls, and a hand scraper does the corners that neither can reach.
We worked from 7am to 11am and again from 5pm to 8pm, because between those hours the room was too hot to stand in. Windows were open at the front and back for a through-draught, the doorway was sealed with plastic and masking tape, and we wore ear defenders, goggles and FFP3 dust masks, which Matt had from work. The dust still got onto the landing, into the bathroom and, somehow, onto the tops of the picture frames downstairs. What I'd change is the door: we taped it at ten to seven on the first morning, and it deserved doing properly the night before. A missed nail head on the first day took out one sheet of abrasive, and we went through 16 in all.
Pickle spent three days shut in the back room with the sofa bed and an expression of deep betrayal. I carried water to her at regular intervals and apologised more than I have ever apologised to a person.
The gouge
It happened at ten past eleven on Thursday morning, on the very last pass by the window. Matt's phone rang (it was Kev, asking how it was going) and he let the drum rest on the board for about a second while he looked at the screen. A drum sander has to be lifted before you stop it, and he knew that, and he did it anyway.
It left a crescent about 12 cm long and 1 mm deep. He tried to sand it out, which only made the dip wider. Filler would never match, so we left it. A cross of masking tape marks the spot, and Matt's verdict was that it will live under a rug.
The money, and the lacquer
- Drum sander and edger hire for three days: £128
- Abrasives, charged by the sheet used: £64
- Water-based lacquer, three coats: £58
- Filler and odds and ends: £12
That comes to £262. On Friday I put on three coats of lacquer, and in that heat each coat dried in under an hour. The first one left a faint ridge where I had paused with the roller, but the second hid it. We kept the room empty for 24 hours and put the bed back on Monday. If I did it again I'd hire the sander for four days and not three, because Friday's lacquering ran on until nearly nine at night and I put the last coat on with a moth in the tin.
The floor came out the colour of honey, with a darker ring where a radiator once leaked and a few gaps between boards that we have left alone for now. The room echoes, which it never did under carpet. I stood in the doorway on Saturday morning with a mug of tea in my socks and felt, for about ten minutes, like someone who owns a house with a real floor in it.
