Staining and varnishing the hallway floor

It's time to finish the floor!  We went for dark teak in the end, which in the samples looked great.  But the sample had been watered down so I had a bit of a test run to see how much to water down.  I went for 1 part stain and 1.5 part water.  As it is a water based stain, the instructions said that you could dilute with water.

But still...

Eeek! So dark!  At this point I panicked.  But I had done too much to go back, so onwards I went!

I started under the stairs which would hopefully be hidden long term to figure out how much to water it down and how to apply it.  I also tried wetting the brush as well as already having the stain watered down, but it was too hard to apply consistently.

It's not incredibly environmentally friendly, but I mixed up the stain in a foil tray.  It was just the right size to hold as much as I needed, but also small enough to be portable.  It is a bit lightweight though so I did have one incident where I accidentally knocked it over :-s

This was after the stain had dried, and you can see it has mellowed a heck of a lot since it first went on - phew!

Next up was varnishing.  I used the complimentary Manns Extra Tough Floor Varnish, to go with the Manns Pine Floor Stain I had used earlier.  It comes in Matt, Satin or Gloss, but apparently 3 coats (the recommended number of coats) of Matt is roughly the same sheen as 1 of satin, so we went for Matt.  We are not a high gloss family!  I find gloss things just show up so many imperfections, so if I could avoid that if possible (knowing there are plenty of imperfections on the floor) then that would probably be best.

I made sure to de-nib (rub down any raised grain) between coats too, with a pad that had been recommended during checkout of buying my supplies.  I'm not sure if it made any difference but I did it anyway.

The stain has made the floor go slightly darker again, which is a slight shame as I loved the colour it had dried to after just the stain.  Saying that though, I still love it a heck of a lot more than the original laminate that was there when we moved in!

The stain and varnish only took an hour to dry per coat so very quick really, but it has still been super tricky to try and get all the coats done!  If it was a spare bedroom you would just paint yourself out the rrom and shut the door.  As this is the hallway, it's so hard as you need to use it all the time!  I ended up varnishing myself to bed, or varnishing my way out to work, so that it would have ample time to dry before I needed to walk on it again.  There was one morning that I was up at 5.30am varnishing the floor before I went to work - nuts!  I still have one more coat to do on a small area downstairs, but the rest of the hallway and landing have had the full 3 coats so I think that's pretty good going.

What will we find under the laminate?

So, having taken a sneaky peek under a corner of the laminate when we got back from Dublin, it was time to lift all of the floor.  All the serious painting had been done, and the risk of damage to it was much smaller now.  It only took about 15 mins, but I was nervous the corner I had lifted might have misled me to the condition of the rest of the floor...

The recent plumbing disaster meant that I was certain we were going to have to lift the boards and do some proper plumbing, rather than the bodge we had tried to get away with.  When we originally started the hallway project, there were no intentions to change the flooring, so lifting it was something we had tried to avoid in case it didn't go back down properly.  What's the moral of the story?  If you going to do something, do it properly!  Lesson learnt!

So, what did the floor have in store for us?

Great access hatch, but strange terminated pipe to the right of our radiator connection.

Pretty good I think!  With a floor sander I'm confident that will come up a treat.  There was even an access hatch (which I think I will eventually cover with a rug) which was really handy as I thought we would have to go in under the stairs to avoid damaging the floor.

The boards under the stairs weren't quite as good, but these would become part of the under stairs cupboard eventually though so I wasn't too concerned.

The void was filled with spiders webs though so there was absolutely zero chance of me getting in there!  I sent the iPhone down though to get some shots of the plumbing situation to see what I was working with...

I was a bit confused by this pipe - it terminated at floor level and seemed to come from the other end of the radiator.  If they were going to change the size of the radiator, why wouldn't they just extend this pipe to the new connection??  

And the irony of it all?  The living room, the room that previously had no radiator before we moved in, the room we had connected up with T pieces through the wall, was actually the room where all of the pipes for the hallway radiator came from!!! Arghhh!

A bit like Monica with the light switch, I became obsessed with tracing the pipes to figure out what the hell was going on.  The hubby turned into Joey at this point, and was not impressed at me moving the sofa  while he was trying to watch the rugby.  

I ripped up the carpet in the living room (meh, we are going to replace it eventually anyway), something I had done before, but not to the same extent as this woman on a mission.  Further into the room I found some access floor boards so I lifted these and sent the camera down again to do some more digging.

Not only, had the heating pipes come from the living room, there had historically been a radiator in the living room which someone had taken out.  The pipes and connections were all there....

Why, why, why, would you remove a radiator from a living room and replace the heat source with a crappy gas fire? WHY?!  Can you tell this frustrated me a little bit? LOL

To be continued...