Tales from the Front: Bear-Proof Your Floor Installation

Back before David Old, president at Las Vegas, N.M.-based Old Wood LLC was in the wood flooring business, he decided he would sand and refinish the Doug fir floors at the family's historic log cabin on their 2,400-acre ranch in the mountains. 

He didn't know a thing about floors, but he drove to town and rented a drum sander, bought some urethane and hired a homeless guy at the Dunkin' Donuts to help him. 

The pair began sanding the Doug fir planks, and, as he tells it, "I'm sanding away when the homeless guy-his name was Rodney-freaked out. He stopped working, sat down on a chair in the living room right where he was working and refused to move till I took him back to town. So I did, and I didn't make it back to the cabin for a couple days. When I walked in, the house was in chaos." 

A ravenous bear waking up from her winter hibernation had destroyed the window over the stove and torn into all the food supplies. Huge bulk containers of sugar, flour, oil, beans and more were ripped apart and mixed together with the liquid from cans of tuna that the bear had chewed through. The hungry beast had even chewed through the two gallons of urethane Old had bought. Now what was left of the food was mixed up with the sanding dust into a gooey, disgusting pond of urethane on top of the freshly sanded floors. 

For added effect, the bear had walked back and forth through the urethane, leaving bear tracks throughout the cabin. Old did complete the job, but he says he still has urethane paw prints on the kitchen floor. You get one guess what he calls the finish … Bearathane!

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