How the 2X Theory Happens

In a previous blog post I described my “2x theory” of renovation, which states simply that it takes twice as long and costs twice as much as you anticipate. Regardless of how carefully you budget. Regardless of how tightly you keep control of your contractors. Regardless of how much of the grunt work you do yourself, or are able to get done by people you’ve rooked for free labor. It just doesn’t matter. At some point in the project, you are going to realize that you have been “2x-ed”.

All the baseboards from the upstairs, and the drawers from the hall built-in.

Here is a prime example of how I got ‘2x-ed’. My dad has been diligently re-wiring the upstairs bedrooms, and we pulled all the baseboards off so that he could run wire behind them and then mount the boxes in the baseboards themselves. This was all part of the plan. Until….

The woodwork upstairs just needed ‘freshening’ I thought. Maybe a little sanding on the window sills where the sun had destroyed the finish, but really I figured there wasn’t much to do on the woodwork up there. It’s beautiful yellow pine – the doors may be fir. Never been painted. So I’m thinking wash it all really well, do some remedial work where needed, I’m good.

The hallway built-in and some of the rest of the woodwork in the upstairs hallway all sanded.

Oh, but no. While I was out of town on business, my mom and dad decided to ‘freshen’ the baseboards we had pulled off. My mom ended up stripping all of them to bare wood. Hmmm. Not in the plan, but OK. The baseboards looked beautiful, all clean and nice. So when I came back, I started looking at the windows more closely. The sills were hammered, and any flat surface where the sun beat on them was equally bad.

So almost $250.00 worth of sandpaper, two weeks of evenings and three weekends later, I’m still not finished sanding all that woodwork. Some of it I have sanded right down to bare wood. For example, we had removed all the woodwork in the bathroom, so that was easy to lay out on a table and sand. The baseboards, already stripped, also got a good sanding. All the ‘attached’ wood has (or will… as I mentioned, I’m not done yet…) received at least a roughing up with 150-grit paper. This will give it tooth to receive a fresh coat of polyurethane.

The windows, however, have received a combination of heavy and light sanding. The parts of the windows that needed a lot of attention, I sanded heavily. The parts that only needed some tooth, that’s all I gave them, but I tried to blend them together as best I could, so that when I coat them with the urethane, it will look good.

One of the windows that needed a combination of heavy and light sanding.

Of course, it’s not just sanding either. I had to break out the paint stripper to remove less-than-competent paint jobs. Apparently the previous owners didn’t believe in masking the woodwork when they painted the walls, and they weren’t the most talented at cutting in around it either. So I had to apply paint stripper to the edges of much of the woodwork, scrape it off and then wipe it down with acetone to smooth it all out.

Fortunately, I did have some help last weekend at just the moment when I was feeling the most overwhelmed. My neighbor’s son, Justin, who has been keeping my very large lawn at bay, volunteered to help. What a huge relief!

So, the expense of sandpaper – I use 5″ hook and loop paper in my random orbital palm sander on the larger flat surfaces, and I use those sponge sanding blocks for all the smaller places my sander can’t reach – and the massive amount of time it takes to sand endless board feet of wood… these combine into this 2x moment in which I am still lingering.

I wore out the sanding pad on my sander and had to borrow my dad's to keep going. Enough already!

May I say at this point that I HATE sanding? I do. I hate it. I’d rather do almost anything but sand. There is nothing remotely positive about the process. It sucks. It is tedious, endless, boring, filthy work. I come home every day caked in fine dust. Even though I wear a respirator, my throat is dry and I cough. My eyes have gook in them.

I wear earplugs to ease the drone of the sander and the shopvac, so even my ear canals are sweaty when I finally relieve them of their plugs. My back hurts from half-bending over board after board. My shoulder muscles get so tight that by the next morning I can barely heave myself out of bed. My hands are so tired and sore that I am constantly dropping stuff during the day. This is just NOT fun, people. Not fun at all.

It became even less fun when I wore out the base of my sander and it wouldn’t hold the hook and loop sandpaper anymore. I would put a piece on, and zing! it would shoot off across the room. After much swearing, I found out (dads are so helpful with these things…) that I had worn out the base and I needed to replace it. Super! Fortunately I could keep going because my dad has the same model sander (and had done the same thing to it, which is why he knew what was wrong), so I borrowed his and kept going.

The best part of this entire part of the project will be the END. And God willing, I shall be done this weekend!

However, I will say this. Once I get all this sanding done, we will be ready to clean the entire upstairs, wipe all the surfaces down, and once they are as dust-free as a 1924 house will allow, we will be ready for urethane and paint! O happy day!

I do, unfortunately, have to use urethane on the upstairs woodwork because at some point the previous owners recoated the woodwork, and it appears they used urethane. I would prefer using shellac, or varnish because urethane has a sort of hard plastic look to me, but since it’s got urethane on it now, if I use something different, the two coatings may react and craze, or not dry completely, or do some other awful thing, and let me tell you this. I will NOT re-do all the prep work I have just done. So urethane it is. I’ll deal.

But this is cool because once the woodwork is done, I can caulk the the joints between the woodwork and the plaster walls (this will give me a nice clean line to paint to). Then I can prime and paint all the walls and ceilings.

After that, it’s bathroom tile. See, that’s what I like – a nice, new surface that doesn’t require any finishing. Tile. Yes!

PS I still have to strip all the woodwork downstairs…