Day 5.
I arose rather late (9:30?) and came downstairs to find Al doing Yoga in our kitchen. He was doing the “Breath of Joy” After a small breakfast, we started in with the sanding. Al had brought a rotary sander (kind of like a power drill) and a belt sander. We were sanding around the edges where the grinder just couldn’t get. It was slow going. VERY slow going. The image that came to mind was cleaning the statue of liberty with a toothbrush. But, stuff was coming up. The only thing was, we could see that some of it was the same sort of stuff that was still on the main body of the floor. That meant that we’d have to do the whole floor, not just the border. At this point, Al decided we should call the rental place I had not tried to deal with yet (having rented from SunBelt, and called (2x) with no answer from Rent-X), and sure enough, they have a floor buffer that you can attach a sanding pad to in order to clean concrete. People do it all the time. Yeah, it’s in and you can come pick it up. And the total cost will be less than half of what you paid for something from SunBelt that didn’t really do the job. Sigh.
So, I went and picked it up. It’s another big, noisy, dust-generating device that I started running up and down the floor. Shortly after I got back with that, Al had to leave, but I now knew what I had to do. And he left me with his rotary sander to do the parts the big buffer/sander wouldn’t get to. So, I spent the rest of the afternoon/early evening sanding the concrete. I’d occasionally take breaks from the big sander to go back to the minute stuff. It’s a little discouraging, because in some sense, I thought cleaning the floor had been done, and I’m still in the middle of it. Now the question is “How clean is ‘clean enough’?” I want it to be clean enough to take the stain reasonably, but I don’t want to spend all week turning the top 16th of an inch of my concrete slab into dust. I have the big buffer/sander until about 2:00 tomorrow, so I figure I’ll go at it again tomorrow.
I remember when I was a kid, my favorite part of just about any job was cleaning up. You sweep up, you put the tools back in the truck, etc. It was a sign that you were DONE, at least for the day. Today, it was more of a pain than anything. I swept away dust from the floor that felt like it must not matter since there was still a pound or two floating in the air. I straightened up, so stuff would be ready for me tomorrow and then got to my new favorite part of the work day — the shower afterward. What a relief. Washing the concrete out of my hair and off my skin, stepping out refreshed.
But wait, Bob comes today, and the ladder to the loft is still broken. When we were out yesterday, Al and I had gotten some larger screws and new hinges, so while Clinton watched Buffy, I put the ladder back together, and did laundry including the sheets for the loft. I made the bed in the loft and got out the comforter since it was kind of cool. It was nice, I wanted to sleep there.
I went to bed (in the master bedroom) around midnight and I don’t think I heard Bob come in. But he slept on the couch in the den anyway. Oh well.