All You Need is Friends

I got a call from one of my friends, Chris, who owns a furniture store. His delivery guys were taking in a refrigerator and scratched the engineered flooring. So, me being his friend, he asked if I could do the repairs, and of course without fail I said, "Sure, why not." Once I got to the job site, I realized that the scratches they put in the floor were all cross-grain. This only made the repair harder, because they were deep. The homeowner did not know what the color was, and with me being (as I have said in the past) colorblind, I had to do what I always do: make a call to my friend Daniel Boone.

I told Daniel what the situation was and he said there's only one way to do it and do it right: use aniline dye and shellac. After about 20 minutes on the telephone with Daniel, he explained to me how to mix up the aniline dye with the shellac. Once again, I'm going to point back to the NWFA and recall all of the classes explaining "chasing the grain" chasing and color match. Getting the color to match was a little bit of a task, but even with my colorblindness, I was able to get it so close that no one's getting notice the difference.

Now, this did not happen in the manner of one or two hours-it took two days for me to get the color right on the money. Getting the grain chased, getting it sanded, getting all of the old color out throughout the entire board plus the engineered floor without a whole lot of wear… it really made me nervous. To add to my pain, the homeowner's son-in-law is a carpet cleaning small business operator. Every night he would come by as I would work on this floor, and of course after I was gone he would critique my work to the homeowner. The homeowner is an 82-year-old woman, nervous as she can be that someone is going to try to take advantage of her and her money. She was unclear as to why it would take me two days to hand-scrape, hand-rub, stain and get the color matched.

So enter in friend number two: Nathan Shaw with Rustoleum. I told Nathan that I had to get this floor right. Obviously I couldn't use an oil-based finish on an engineered finish. So I asked if he could provide me with his Nano finish and the Pre-Fin product to help it stick. I've used this before on an engineered floor, with some of the best luck I've had with a factory-finished recoat. At this point I told Nathan the truth about my skills with a T-bar and water-based finish. I think the best way to describe my skills with a T-bar is very, very weak…  at best. As luck would have it, a distributor in Nashville was having an open house that week, so Nathan volunteered to help me get this floor coated.

It was my job to get it prepped and ready so that all he had to do was come in and help me coat the floor. Here's the preparation we did for the floor to get it ready for the water-based finish:

Step 1: Swept and vacuumed the floor extremely well so there was nothing on the floor.Step 2: Took my auto scrubber with the prefinished cleaner that Rustoleum recommends and cleaned the floor well.Step 3: Abraded the finish, this was an aluminum oxide finish hard as a brick. I took what we call the "shake and bake"-our large orbital sander-and used the SPP pad from 3M with aluminum oxide gold strips. I won't lie: It took a lot of effort to get this floor sanded uniformly only because the floor was a glue-down job, and over time it had a little bit of cup in the floor. Step 4: Once I got it abraded uniformly, I took the wet tack and vacuum and worked the floor over, probably seven or eight times.

I'm so happy that Nathan decided to come help me on this job.  We had one concern and one concern only: the finish sticking to the factory finish floor. With a boatload of instruction and hands-on training from Nathan, the finish worked, went down very smooth and, most importantly, it laid down flat as a pancake. The homeowner is very happy with the job and the carpet cleaning son-in-law had no idea the floor could look that good. So, it looks like I made everyone happy… all with a little help from my friends:

Chris (my friend with the furniture store) took the furniture back into the house today, and he and his crew had no idea where the repairs were. So in my mind, after attending all the NWFA classes, anytime you can do a repair-not a "patch"-you win. Write me my check!

This week I'm working on a laminate floor for my cousin. It's an insurance job but I want to keep it as low as I can so it reduces the burden on them. Should have that job done by Wednesday of this week and then I'm off to St. Louis to work a show with a distributor.

Next week when I get back from St. Louis, I start a refinish job on an old house in McKenzie, Tenn. The homeowner bought the house, which they feel is worth about $200,000. It is a foreclosure that I think-and I'm just guessing-but I believe they picked it up for $60,000. It's not a real big job; I can do it by myself, but I think the biggest pain will be the board repairs in this old floor. The house has been empty for 2 1/2 years with no heat, no air… just shut down windows and shut down doors with lots of dust. The sad part of this whole house (actually this whole job) is that the homeowner who lost the house destroyed it before they moved out. I can understand being disappointed about losing a home or foreclosure, but being an idiot and destroying the house is just not right. The homeowner wants an extremely flat, no-shine finish. So my choice for that type of finish is Monocoat. I think it will go great with the house because it's an older home. The original look was waxed floors, but no one wants to do the maintaining of the wax floors now. I tried to get them to go with the wax floors from DuraSeal, as that is the look they want, but the issue was the maintenance.

Well, it's getting late and I have got to get ready for tomorrow and get going on this insurance job. Be safe!