How I survived my home improvement project

It was somewhere in the midst of sanding round No. 4 on 2,000 square feet of hardwood floors last week when I got the urge to give up.

In the first place, I wondered why I had even thought refinishing our hardwood floors ourselves would be a good idea. I had watched "how to" videos on YouTube and I had read tutorials on Pinterest. I'm the daughter of a contractor, so I grew up on job sites and relish a good home improvement project.

Refinishing the entire first floor of our home wouldn't be easy, but it couldn't be that difficult, right? I was unfortunately so very wrong.

(Husband, if you are reading this column, you may want to print it out and save it in a scrapbook for the grandkids one day — so you can show them the time I admitted that you were right.)

Thankfully, my husband has been a good sport in this never-ending, soremuscle inducing, blister-causing nightmare of a project.

I first hired some college students to move furniture out of the first floor of our home temporarily. I reserved rental sanders, bought stain (not enough) and ordered professional-quality polyurethane (definitely not enough of it.) We boarded our dogs at the vet, sent our three kids to spend a week at Grandmom's and then the work began.

The week would be a rare, child-free week with my husband. Sort of like a stay-cation marriage retreat at home, only with hard labor involved.

Sounds like relaxing spring break, right?

I should have known, with the first swipe of a 100-pound drum sander, that no single part of the project would be easy.

Day One, sore shoulders. Day Two, I started building calluses on my hands and it hurt to make a fist. By Day Five, I had blisters on my knees from basically planking for eight hours while staining the hardwood floor — and I was wearing knee pads.

Despite what anyone may say, it was definitely a workout I should have trained for. And thankfully, my husband was right there with me, assisting in the sanding, helping make the refinished hardwoods of my dreams become reality. He also calmed calming me down and talked me off a ledge when I'd obsess about whether the stain was stirred well enough, or if we were truly sanding with the grain.

Somewhere around Day Four, when we officially derailed off schedule, I realized that the sander I was using had inadvertently caused thousands of "chatter marks" in the wood of the entire first floor of our home.

I admittedly panicked, and called every contractor I could think of. Surely someone could help us fix it — and the initial estimate I got was staggering, just for re-sanding the floor. I was about to give up and live with the dented floor when the owner of a flooring company I called showed up at my house.

I had never met the man before, and embarrassingly explained our conundrum. Expecting another high quote for smoothing out the floors, the man asked if he could test out one of our sanders. Within a few minutes, he showed us how we could get the "chatter marks" out of the wood ourselves, with the equipment we already had. It would take lot of work, and a lot of strength, but it could be done, he explained.

I stood there, speechless, and in tears. For so many years, I did home improvement projects alongside my dad, and if I ever had an issue, he would always know the answer. My dad would always help. But, it's been almost exactly five years since my dad died. And the hardwood floor issues were yet another reminder to me that my dad is no longer here, and he couldn't be called to save the day.

Instead, a man who owns a local flooring company did.

The man asked about our plans on refinishing the floor, and gave me a few pointers. We talked about our dogs, and he left, without charging me a fee.

And just like the man showed us, we got (almost all) those marks out of the floors. The project took a lot longer than we expected, was more grueling than I ever dreamed. It gave me newfound respect for people who refinish floors for a living. It's very hard labor — comparable, I believe, only to childbirth.

But since the project is almost finished, I can now look at the beautiful, gleaming wood floors and be thankful for the fruits of our (hard-won) labor — and be reminded of the stranger whose simple kindness made all the difference.

We'll certainly be hiring his company in the future — there is, after all, the upstairs still to be done.

Lydia Seabol Avant writes The Mom Stop for The Tuscaloosa News. Reach her at momstopcolumn@gmail.com.