As mentioned in our last post, we’re working on a major renovation of our family room.
Our number one goal is to brighten up the room. The space is narrow and dark. We can’t change the narrow, but we can make it brighter. Although we’ve gone back and forth quite a bit, we decided to keep the wood, but strip it so that we could try a lighter stain.
The short wall below separates the family room from the kitchen. We’re going to make it a larger opening, but for now we’re going to use it as a wall to test the various shades of stain =)
TJ was focused on another project and sanding is almost always my responsibility anyway, so I threw on safety gear and got going. For heavy duty stripping you’ve got to use a heavy duty sander – so I began with our belt sander. You’ve got to be careful with belt sanders because they can easily dig in too far to make your wood uneven. Yes, I know this from personal experience! They’re also heavy, especially when you’re sanding vertically and above your head. See the dust covering the floor – notice how my hair color matches =)?
One of our boys came to visit and offered to help. I told him I didn’t need any help. Wait, what? Correction, I filled the room with (saw)dust doing a happy dance.
After getting most of the stain off we followed with an oscillating sander switching to finer grades of sandpaper until reaching the smoothness we needed. You’ll notice we left stain at the top and bottom of the walls. That’s because we knew those areas would be covered by trim.
As a reminder, here is what the room looked like before.
And here is where we are so far.
It’s been a lot of work, but is starting to look better already! We start new lighting next.
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