After my mother (aka the unpaid laborer) left, I discovered that I had wrongly discounted my father's advice. During my mother's long days of scraping my bedroom floor, he suggested buying a belt sander and using that to remove the rubber and glue on the floor. (My father's most treasured DIY motto, "Never do it by hand when you could use a machine," closely followed by, "That took longer that I thought it would.") The sander works better than a scraper, which means my mother did more work than she needed to.
However, the sanding is still pretty intense. I can manage about 30 minutes a day, after which the sander gets too hot and my arms are too tired to continue. Using a belt sander is much more difficult than an oscillating sander; since the belt is moving in only one direction, you are continually fighting against a machine that wants to fly away. It's like trying to continually hold back a toddler who wants to dash out into the street.
It also generates enormous amounts of dust. Here I am, covered in black rubber dust and brandishing my sander. The picture quality is poor, but that's because there's so much junk in the air that it's hard to see.
4 comments:
Your unpaid laborer says, "I am glad it is you doing the sanding, not me." But I am glad you are making progress. Advice from your father, "When I sand a lot, I hold the sander at arm's length so I don't have to fight it as hard."
Good advice from you father - but your mum's efforts must be making the job a little easier.
I am definitely NOT the DIY type.
LOL, RM. I could HEAR your father saying that, "that took longer than I thought it would."
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