Matt asked for a sander and some maroon pads for taking off the top layer of polyurethane. Since we were not pros at this [by any stretch of the imagination!] he made sure to tell the guy at the desk exactly what we were doing. We knew we needed maroon pads because that is what the This Old House website told us. However, they didn’t have maroon, they only had red and he told us this is what we needed.
We plopped it in the back of our car and headed home, ready to sand!!
We decided to start upstairs in one of the back guest rooms since we had heard horror stories about waves in the floor from inexperienced refinishers. If we were going to have waves, we wanted them in rooms we didn’t frequent.
I tried my best at running the sander and I just couldn’t get a hold of it. It kept going the wrong way and I didn’t quite get how to use it. Apparently, you move it left and right by moving the handles up and down. I was unaware of this and kept pushing down on the handles to try and get it to sit still! I think Matt took a lot of amusement in watching the lap around me in circles!
I handed the machine over to Matt and he took at try at it. He handled it with such grace, but it wasn’t doing anything. The sander was circling, but not pulling anything up! We had the wrong buffing pads....
[Maroon does not equal red]
The pads we had were for cleaning floors [like the ones the janitors used to clean the halls in elemetary school]. At the time we were slightly exhausted from pulling up staples and may have been ready to quit, but headed over to big box store #1 to pick up the right sander and pads.
After searching for ourselves we found the correct pads that only fitted a different sander [they did not have maroon pads for the one we had]. We didn’t have the old sander to return in exchange for the correct one, but since we didn’t want to make another trip, we rented the new sander and bought the new pads.
What is more fun was when we found out that the bag [where some of the dust from the floor goes into] for the new sander was recalled. So, we would have to buy a shop vac if we wanted to rent the sander. The person telling us this was hilarious. She said, “Let me leave while you make your decision so that you can say just how much you love big box store #1”. [Mind you this had been no quick exchange, we were probably in there for 2 hours figuring out what we needed and trying to talk to].
We said some “nice” things about the store and decided to rent the sander, buy the maroon pads, and the shop vac [we needed a shop vac anyway].
Now we were ready to sand!
Question: How many times do you think you go back and forth from home improvement stores when you do a reno?
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