Bed Stuy Reno: Parlor Floor
November 9, 2009
Back Parlor Sanding
Removing the Paper After Painting
The First Pass with the Drum Sander
The Finished Results
After painting the back parlor room, G and I switched gears the following weekend to sanding the floor. We still had the sander and edger we were borrowing from our generous neighbor, with which we had previously sanded the kitchen floor.
We needed the back parlor habitable by Thanksgiving, since G’s mom was coming from Brussels to stay with us. At the time, G and I were camping out on the bottom floor and trying to get the top floor rented. The last time G’s mom had come for a visit, we were still living on the top floor, where we had just finished painting and sanding, and the bottom two floors of the house were still deeply “in progress.” We wanted to show G’s mom that the house had evolved since her last visit, and also give her a comfortable room to stay in.
We had about three weekends to go before T-day, so we needed to crank through the sanding and get on to the sealing, so we could let the floor dry, and then try to furnish the room in some kind of inviting way.
When sanding, G works the drum sander, and I work the edger. I hate the edger. It’s heavy and awkward to use, and extremely powerful and aggressive, so requires a lot of control. It’s also incredibly loud, and the whole thing creates a lot of dust too. The experience of sanding is really intense, kind of like spending a day inside an airplane engine. But the best part of it is the transformative results.
The back parlor floor cleaned up pretty well – I wouldn’t say perfect, being that there were a lot of stains and weird marks to begin with. We got maybe 80% of all the stains and marks up, but the floor still bears some evidence of its history.
October 26, 2009
Back Parlor Painting
Cleaning and Prepping the Back Parlor
Ceiling Painted with "Swiss Coffee," Priming Moldings and Taping Off
Cutting In and Painting the Walls with "Desert Twilight"
Ok, so with the Kitchen mostly buttoned up, G and I moved upstairs to the back parlor room. This room was to become our bedroom, and we wanted it to be both warm and comfortable as a space. I had seen some images at the time of a bedroom with a bold grayish-green set off with some warm rich wood tones that I was really digging. We decided to search for our own bold grayish-green color, and thought that someday, when our fireplace was stripped (and the firebox rebuilt and working as a wood-burning fireplace, you know, sometime after that fireplace grant came through), it would act as the warm rich wood tone that would go nicely with the beautiful bold walls.
We looked through our Benajmin Moore color fan, and settled first on a color called “Durango,” which I was all for. It was deep and rich and almost a greenish brown, or brownish green, whichever you prefer. For the ceiling and molding colors, we wanted a white, but something that was also warm and rich itself. G liked a color I think called “Mayonnaise,” which is funny because in Belgium (where G hails from), they eat their fries with mayonnaise. But then we settled on “Swiss Coffee,” which I think is a winner as a paint name. We used a matte for the ceiling, and a semi-gloss for the moldings.
Once we had the “Swiss Coffee” picked, we sort of chickened out on the boldness of the “Durango,” and hedged to a lighter version of grayish-green, Benjamin Moore’s “Desert Twilight.”
We started first by getting all the crap we had been storing in the room out of the room. The focus had been on the Kitchen and Lower Level after all our work in the Apartment . The Parlor Floor, once we finished closing it up and dealing with the ceilings, was where we stored things that we didn’t know where else to store – tools, pianos, G’s giant puzzle-piece artwork, etc.
Once we had the room cleaned out, and radiators removed (heavy, heavy radiators) we began by painting the ceiling and one remaining area of wall that still had the picture molding and lincrusta paneling. Generally, when painting, I’m on rolling and G is on cutting in. Over time, we’ve both gotten pretty good at our roles, and can knock stuff out fairly quickly when we need to. We got the painting of the room done in one weekend, working a full Saturday and Sunday. (The room had previously been primed with the help of G's friends.)
When it came time to get to the walls, we opened the can of paint and said, “well, here goes.” Along with the “Piano Concerto” of the bathroom, this was our boldest color yet on a wall (not withstanding the orange door in the apartment). But we were pretty happy with the results in the end, and thought the room looked both warm and inviting, but also somewhat sophisticated (at least by our broke-ass standards).
