May 23, 2021

Boho Porch Makeover - Spring 2021 One Room Challenge: Weeks 2 & 3

I may be late, but I'm still here! This One Room Challenge is certainly pushing me in ways the first one didn't, which has been interesting to say the least!

If you're new here, welcome! Get caught up on my porch makeover plans and progress here:

Week 1 //

Weeks 2 and 3 of the ORC were all about this dang porch floor! This thing has seen better days, and has had many, many paint jobs over the years. The plan for the porch has always been to paint the floor, but I just couldn't paint over it in it's current state, so we decided to nix all those old layers of paint and start with a fresh slate.

Let me take you on the journey to unearth this hardwood floor.

First, a reminder of where we started:

Phase 1 - Total Confidence

I thought I had this floor all figured out. I assessed the situation and confidently bought the largest container of paint stripper I could find. Surely this would do the trick!

(Spoiler: It did not do the trick.)

After several applications of paint stripper and some good old fashion paint scraping, we got ourselves to this point. Yikes.

Phase 2 - Let's Get Scrappy

Okay, so clearly the paint stripper was not the answer. To think of the brain cells I sacrificed trying to make that work...

The next idea was to use what we had on hand. My brother offered up his angle grinder, which is kind of like a sander but not really. We used the wire brush attachment and had some very encouraging results!

Here I was still getting used to using the angle grinder, but look! Raw wood!

Phase 3 - Time to Bring in the Big Guns

So although the angle grinder worked well, it was just too dang slow. This porch is 187 square feet, and I was not about to angle grind my way down every inch of it.

Time for reinforcements. Off to Home Depot to rent what would prove to be the perfect took for the job: a heavy duty floor sander.

It took a little getting used to, but once we got it rolling, that old paint was nowhere to be seen! The satisfaction of sanding away 4 layers of paint so quickly was just... *chef's kiss*.

So that's the journey of our floor stripping extravaganza these past 2 weeks. As you can see from the picture above, the floor sander didn't get around the edges, so we still have some work to do to finish the job. But look how far we've come!!!

This week, the goals are to finish sanding the floor, clean everything up and prep the walls for paint. Be sure to check out all the other amazing home projects going on now over at the One Room Challenge blog. See you next week!

-Sam