I am still on my knees doing floors. Last night I hit the wall. It was both literally and figuratively.I spent part of the day sanding off stain I had put down since I found my sanding machine had made little circle marks all over the floor. After the sanding I tried a new method of staining and then masked all of the baseboards so the stain would not get on the baseboards. I was on my knees most of the day

Along about half way though the den I lost my balance in my praying stance and flopped over and hit the wall and I was so tired I just slid down to the floor and lay there. I thought I should just take a nap but figured if I went to sleep in hard shell, gel infused knee pads and gloves with a roll of frog tape in my hand more than my knees would be stiff today.

I thought my knees would give out but I found that my right arm was the most difficult. When I knelt down I leaned on my right arm and then as I went along I leaned on it for about everything I did. Both the bottom of my palm and my biceps are croaked.

The real problem with all of this are the circle marks the sander made. It looks like the floor has the chicken pox. It does not show from a standing position but if you get on your knees it is painfully obvious. That is when I found them, when I was on my knees when I started cutting the corners with stain.

I cannot get the right heads and sanding screens for my sander. If I had them I am sure we would not have had the circles. As I wrote in the blog entry Dancing with the Ones You Brung, the wrong tool means the work is wrong. I tried to make what I had work and it did not. It did everything I had the right tools for perfectly.

Yesterday afternoon I decided even though things were generally going swimmingly I needed to call in the big dogs to deal with my circles. We needed to rent one of those monster sanders.

At that very moment the gentleman who owns the regional equipment rental business showed up in my driveway.The gentleman was very nice, we visited for a good long while and he toured the house. He told me of his own house that had belonged to his grandfather. He shared with me some of the things they had discovered over the years as he and his family had worked on the house. It made giving in and renting a big sander easier.

His arrival was an omen. Sander wrangling for me. I had to shuck out the $60 a day to rent the big dog.

Which is why I hit the wall last night. At $60 a day I wanted to be ready to maximize my work time and minimize the cost. I just hope my big dog sander will want to stay in the house. I hope it is not a Marmaduke on a lead trying to make a break for the outside through one of the sliding glass doors.