Well, yesterday didn’t quite go as planned. My floors in the bedroom suite still aren’t completely finished, but they’re close! I only have one more step to do, and then they’ll be finished. But let me start at the beginning and share the good, the bad, and the humiliating from yesterday.
Yesterday morning, I showed you what our red oak hardwood floors looked like after I spent three days sanding off the dark finish using the drum sander and the edge sander, doing more detail sanding and scraping to remove the finish around the door jambs and corners, and then adding a coat of Bona NaturalSeal to the floors.
My plan for yesterday was to do the first coat of Bona TrafficHD clear coat early in the morning, then do a second coat in the early afternoon (since each coat dries in about two hours). Then I’d take a break and have an early dinner with a friend, and on my way home, I’d stop at Home Depot to rent a buffer so that I could buff the floor before adding the third and final coat of TrafficHD clear coat. I felt pretty confident that I’d have the floor finished by the time I went to bed.
The first coat went as planned. The second coat went as planned. Renting the buffer went as planned.
I got home with the buffer around 7:45pm, and I estimated it would take me about an hour to buff the floor, about 30 minutes to do a final vacuuming of the floor, and about 40 minutes to apply the final coat. I’d be done around 10:00 or 10:30 at the latest. That seems like a reasonable plan, right? Wrong. 😂
I got the buffer inside, got it plugged in, and got the attachments on and ready to go, and that’s when my plan went sideways. Have y’all ever used one these machines? Oh my gosh. How in the world is it even possible?! I can imagine that’s it’s probably easier to use on a wet application, but how is it even possible to use this on a dry application like I needed to do?
I had watched a YouTube video of someone using this exact machine (but he was using it on a wet application with water and suds), and they warned that if you’ve never used a slow speed buffer before, you’ll need to take some time to get used to it. They warned that it may take a few tries before you figure it out, and it’s best to start in the middle of a large room. So that’s what I did. I started right in the middle of the bedroom, pressed the button on the side, braced myself as much as I could to push back against the force that I was expecting from the spinning pad, and then squeezed the handles to make the buffer start turning.
Within what seemed like a split second, the buffer had flown from the center of the room, across the floor, and into the side wall, dragging me behind it holding on for dear life and bashing a hole in the drywall.
The crazy thing is that when a big machine flies out of control like that, your natural instinct and reflex is to hold on even tighter to try to control it. But holding on tighter means squeezing the handles even harder, and that just makes the buffer go faster! 😂 It seems completely counterintuitive to release the handles and let go completely when it starts to get away from you, especially when your reflexes tell you to grab on tighter.
So I tried again. And again. And again. I tried it probably ten times, and it wasn’t getting any better. No matter how tightly I held on, or how much I braced myself, there was no way I could get the buffer to stay in one place. It was physically impossible for me to keep the buffer from flying across the floor each time I started it.
I finally gave up after about the tenth try when it left this light curved mark on the floor.
I don’t know if you can see it, but I can, and it frustrates the heck out of me. The good news is that if that mark shows after the final clear coat, at least it’ll be under the area rug.
In total, it took me about ten minutes to realize this just wasn’t going to happen. There was no way this buffer machine and I were going to get along. I’m a pretty stubborn and determined woman, but I was battling a machine that was even more stubborn and determined that I was, and even with all of the strength I could muster, I was no match for it. So about ten minutes after unloading it from the van and wheeling it into the bedroom, I was rolling up the cord, wheeling it back to the van, and heading back to Home Depot.
I couldn’t help but laugh when the man who had just rented out the buffer to me looked up and saw me wheeling that machine back into the rental department. He didn’t even react, almost like he had been expecting me. 😀 I just laughed and said, “I don’t even come close to being strong enough to use this machine.” He grinned at me and said, “I thought it might be a problem for you.” Ugh. Why didn’t he warn me? I mean, I know why he didn’t. He couldn’t. It’s not exactly acceptable these days for a man to say to a woman, “I don’t think you’ll be able to use this.” But I sure wish he could have said that to me before I wasted time renting it, dragging it home, bashing holes in the wall, leaving marks on the floor, and dragging that machine back to Home Depot.
I had it for such a short time that he was kind enough to just void the rental contract and refund the rental fee to me. So the whole humiliating experience only cost me the $10 I wasted on the buffer pad and the hour of time I wasted on two trips to Home Depot.
I laughed until I had tears streaming down my face when he handed me the voided contract and I saw this…
Yes, that’s right. It was a half day rental. Actual time? 19 minutes. 🤣🤣 Oh my gosh, I’m laughing so hard again right now that I can barely see through my tears. 🤣 I’m pretty sure I had it longer than that because the drive from our house to Home Depot is about 12-15 minutes. So just driving home with the buffer and then driving back would have taken 25-30 minutes. Maybe he tweaked it a little because it has to be under a certain time limit in order to void it. I’m not sure. If that’s the case, I’m very thankful that he had pity on me. But it’s still so funny, an a little embarrassing, to see that on the rental contract.
But I still had to sand the floor before the final coat because the floor was too rough to put the final coat on without sanding. So I ended up doing the entire thing with my little 5-inch sander and 220-grit sanding discs.
It actually didn’t take that long. I think I got the whole floor in all three areas sanded in about an hour and 15 minutes. That’s not too bad. But I didn’t have time to do the final coat of clear coat lasts night. I’ll have to finish up today. So yesterday didn’t quite end how I had planned, but at least I learned something (that lesson being that I CANNOT use a floor buffer), and I got a good laugh out of the deal.
In other news, I took a chance and ordered the fourth closet rod that I needed from a different Amazon store. It matched perfectly, and I managed to cut it to the right length this time, so at least that’s done.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
