Day 8, Ogden Enterprise

The days have been flying by, full of hard work and dizzying heat! Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday we finished the floor. In order to do the back rooms, we took all of the doors off. Some were so damaged, they had to be thrown away.

Many of the doors in the house look like this, especially in the downstairs.
Even taking the doors off was a chore. The hinges were so heavily painted that the pins would not come out. So we tried to remove the hinges. Some of them had been nailed in with 16 penny nails! Very difficult to remove!

  After putting the sealer on the floor and letting it dry, we went over it with a square buffer sander and 220 grit screen. We rented the machine at Home Depot. Finally, we put a clear polyurethane finish on the floor. It dried for 24 hours, then we hand sanded any places where there were drips or application marks with an orbital hand sander. Joe was way more particular than I was. He noticed every mistake, but I thought everything looked so beautiful!

The first night the finish went on, we slept in the car in the driveway. I guess we could have asked friends to stay, but we were so yucky and tired that we didn't want to see anyone! It wasn't that uncomfortable, in fact, it was easier on my back than our pad on the floor. The night the second coat went on we completed our work at 11 pm. We drove to Motel 6 to spend the night there.

Finally, the floors are done! I'm so pleased with how they turned out. The neighbors came to peek at it as it was curing. One of them said, "Weren't the floors a lot darker than that?"

Yes, they were! They were so dirty they looked several shades darker than the finished product:

In between doing the floors, we've been clearing the trash out of the yard, adding weed and feed, and dejunking. The previous occupants left a lot of their junk behind.

We've had a chance to do a little exploring around town, besides our trips to WalMart, Lowes, and Home Depot! One afternoon we went to the city center and got real Mexican tacos from an authentic taco cart. Yesterday we drove a little way up Ogden Canyon just as the sun was going down. As we drove, the air cooled and we drew great breaths of relief! We passed a small waterfall and a scary-looking suspension bridge. We stopped at a small cafe and shared a raspberry shake.

Yesterday, our moving van arrived in the late afternoon. We had a few tense moments as he manoevered the truck into our narrow driveway. After what seemed like a hundred trips from truck to garage in the hot sun, we snapped at each other, both feeling we were doing more than our fair share! Luckily, two strong friends showed up at 5:00 and worked for over two hours hauling the heavy stuff. They helped us unload the lion's share of the truck, and then we sat in our run-down back yard on folding chairs and shared pizza and root beer.

We still can't put much furniture on the floors. But the high point of the day was setting up our bed. After a week of aching backs, we finally have somewhere to rest our weary bodies! Hallelujah!