Digging Out of a Big Hole

The other day I started out making a video for all the blog readers on tinting finish. I may share it later, but along the way, one level of the project ended up being very complicated and we had to refinish the floor three times. The finish manufacturer had suggested one particular brand of tint that I later found out is not very miscible with the finish. The tint likes to fall out of solution pretty quickly. We ended up getting the project right with three attempts, but I wanted to write about something related but different today.

I admit that sometimes when I'm in a hole I don't know when to stop digging. A lot of it has to do with the fact that you never want to admit you're in the middle of a problem, especially when coating a floor that took a long time to get looking good. I read a quote a friend posted on Facebook the other day: "When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves."

I was in the final stages of a big remodeling project last week when I started digging a hole and stopped too late. We are working on a big white oak job, and the base color for the floor is Dura Seal Coffee Brown. Here it is with the stain:

From there we were darkening the floor quite a bit by adding a Lamp Black colorant from the paint store into the sealer. If anyone has done this before, you probably know that the pigment doesn't actually dissolve into the sealer to make a solution, but is more of a colloidal suspension. As a result, you have to constantly stir and agitate the mix to prevent the settling of the colorant to the bottom, which happens fast.

The stain job was pretty easy to get right, but it's the applying the sealer that got the best of me. During the application of the upstairs bedrooms and stair, the process went very well and the sealer looked amazing. Here's a shot of the stairs done with the sealer and tint:

After doing the upstairs bedrooms, I decided to lay the roller down in an area that was getting carpet later while I brushed between the balusters.

After about 20 minutes of coating the stairs we were ready for the downstairs. We trimmed out a section of the floor in a back bedroom and I started rolling with my roller and immediately the look just wasn't right-it was too dark. I figured that it must be because there was more daylight in that bedroom. Well, you can just imagine where this is going. We started down the 25-foot-long hallway and things were still not right, but I decided this time it was because the hallway was dark. By the time we came into the kitchen I knew something was screwed up, but I was sure it would be okay.

The downstairs floor ended up being pretty inconsistent in shade. We broke out the buffer on the floor, thinking that it would fix everything by buffing it evenly. Buffing the floor only made things worse, and after a couple of minutes I knew we needed to take things back down to bare wood. If I had stopped in the hallway when things didn't look right, we would have only had to sand the hallway and back bedroom. Instead, because I wasn't willing to listen to my instinct, we ended up re-sanding the whole downstairs to fix things twice.

We eventually traced the problem back to the roller being overloaded with pigment-our other roller wasn't producing the problem because it had been in use the whole time. We got the project back on course, and the designer and homeowner are happy with our efforts.

During the re-sanding I told one of my employees that I wish we had stopped at the hallway. Admitting you've messed up isn't easy, but the bigger the hole you dig to fix things, the harder it is to regain confidence. It's hard to admit defeat just once when you put your heart into your work, but stopping early on is a REALLY good habit to learn. It will save you time and money in materials.