Ahhh, the smell of polyurethane…
Before we left for vacation, I cleaned up the garage fairly throughly. That was so I could put the Aztec inside while we were out of town, and because I wanted to get some dust out before I started finishing the baseboard in earnest.
Last night I got home from work, changed clothes, and cleaned the garage out again. After about fourty-five minutes of moving things around, I was able to start staining the rest of the baseboard. Less than an hour later, all 350 feet of 3.5″ baseboard was stained. Yay!
So I cleaned up the garage some more, put drop cloths over all the important things that need covered, setup the saw-horses and my workmate so I can hold larger pieces of wood, got out the HVLP sprayer & my gallon pail of polyurethane only to find…
The pail apparently didn’t seal well. This is what I get for neglecting the cleanliness of the pail the first time or two I used it, before I had the HVLP sprayer. The polyurethane had a 1/8th inch thick hardened covering. With that much of the hardener setup in the pail, I didn’t feel safe using it. Drat.
So I went back inside, got Kylene to take a study break (she’s working on EMT prerequisites) and we went to Lowes to buy a smaller can of polyurethane.
Once we got back, I spent maybe 20 minutes carefully spraying, and in that time got the first coat covered on thirteen 13′ long pieces of baseboard. In 20 minutes! Clean-up took another fifteen minutes. That’s 35 minutes to polyurethane 169′ linear feet of baseboard! I covered 7098 square inches (~49.29 square feet!) of material in 20 minutes! Remarkable! It would have taken at least an hour and a half to do that by hand with a 3″ brush.
I checked this morning when I got up, and it’s already dry! I should be able to prep and spray the top coat tomorrow. My hope is that by next friday I’ll have everything sprayed and finished. We’ll see how well that works out.