The other stuff I meant to post about

[mousme]

Okay, I'm still too angry to post about OSBPGate, but other stuff happened today which I wanted to post about.

For one, I managed to get my new worms. They are now happily ensconced in the old bin (which I emptied out into the garden and hosed off beforehand), along with a bunch of earth and newspaper. This time around, I am keeping them the hell away from the cats. They are going to chill for a week to adapt to their new home, and then I will start feeding them delicious veggie scraps.

I also went to Home Depot about my floors -the one on the border of Westmount on Courcelles St. What a difference! Not only were the staff polite, friendly and informative, they went out of their way to help me. I had no fewer than five(!) employees ask me if they could help. Two of them referred me to their colleagues, who were better-placed to answer my questions, but both accompanied me to the aforementioned colleagues and made sure that I wasn't made to wait. In fact, one of them apologized for the wait, when I hadn't been standing there for more than four minutes. I got clear explanations, helpful suggestions, and a run-down of all my options, including what they thought would be best for my situation and budget. They gave me price ranges, troubleshooting tips, and were all-around awesome.

I am going back during my week off to rent a floor sander. I am going to try sanding and re-varataning the floor, rather than replacing it entirely. The staff at Home Depot encouraged me to try this first (and a few other people on my flist suggested this as well). I am cautiously optimistic.

The rest of the day was spent sleeping. Between the bright!happy!sunshine and the heat, sleeping during the day has become something of a challenge. Still, I appear to be doing okay so far. *knocks on wood*

Comments

[ai731.livejournal.com]

About floor sanders (having been through this once with my house in the UK):

The tool rental place may try to rent you 2 machines, a full-sized floor sander, which looks something like this:


(it may also have a big bag to collect sawdust)

These are huge, heavy, very noisy, and very, very difficult to use properly.

And a smaller, "edging" sander that looks more like this:



Since the area of floor is really quite small (by floor sander standards, I mean), I would strongly suggest that you only rent the smaller "edging" sander. They are much easier to use and control, and really all you need. I did my entire dining room floor in the UK with a very small one.

[taxlady.livejournal.com]

I second what ai731 said. If it is a small space, you really don't want the big one. Until you get used to that kind, they "dance" all over the place and would probably bang into your walls.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Interesting. The guy did show me both, telling me I'd need to use the smaller one for edging and detail work. He sort of hinted that I'd find it very long to do the whole floor with the small hand-held job, but he may not have understood just how small my floor surface is.

I'd personally feel much more comfortable with the small hand-held job, if only because two of the five helpful Home Depot people said the large ones are tricky to handle, can buck/pull in unexpected ways, and do an uneven sanding job in inexperienced hands (ie, mine). So if I can get away with that, it would be awesome.

Do you recall at all how big your dining room floor in the UK was, and how long it took you to do the whole job? A day? Two days? A week?