Polyurethane part 2

 Now the type of poly we picked, well we picked it for a reason. And the reason was that if you re-coat after a certain amount of time, you don't have to sand in between coats. Now, this sounds pretty awesome, because not only does it save a lot of time, but you don't have to rent a buffer. And that is a pretty big draw because buffers are notoriously hard to use (with good reason, I now have experience, but more on that later). We also went with a glossy finish for the first two coats after reading that even if you want to end up with satin or semi gloss finish, you want to start with high gloss so as not to introduce any milkiness to the final look (apparently with some polys the chemicals that caused the less glossy finish can also create a milky look if applied in multiple coats).

So, after the first coat we were feeling pretty good. It had been easier than we were really thinking and we'd gotten done in a reasonable window. We'd done the first coat in the morning so we went and had lunch and came back after about 6 hours.

But here's the thing, we weren't super certain about the timeline for a number of reasons. The can said 8-10 hours at 77 degrees, but a lot of things can affect how fast poly dries, namely: time, temperature, and humidity. We had a time metric, based on the can, and a temperature range of 60-80 (with the example begin at 77), but it didn't say anything about humidity. However, our handy dandy book tells us that the higher the temperature and the lower the humidity, the faster drying occurs. Now we were doing this in Feb, so the temp outside was only 45 and we couldn't turn on the heat because we didn't want to blow dust everywhere. So we were doing our best with a bunch of space heaters but we could only get up to around 65 in the house BUT the humidity that day was low, closer to 30 than the 50 our book recommended. So we figured, low temp slows drying, but low humidity speeds it. Then there was the fact that it had taken us 3 hours to do it. So, we figured, if the max time was 10 hours, and we started in the back, then after about 6 hours after we finished it would be dry enough to walk down teh hall, but not so dry that by the time we were done we'd be over the 10 hour mark. Wheew, its exhausting just writing about it. Needless to say, we probably overthought it, but after 6 hours we came back, tapped on the floor next to the kitchen, and said, what the hell, let's do it.

So, we got all set up again and started over. But here's the thing, it was about 4pm at that point and there were a couple things we didn't bargain on. One was the fading light, not all the rooms have overhead light and overhead light isn't really the best light for this kind of work anyway. And then there was the fact that the sheen for our first coat was glossy. Which meant that I couldn't tell the difference between the new wet application. And that my friends, is a problem. Because if you can't tell where you've put the poly, there's pretty much no way to apply a second coat with any confidence. We soldiered on, but it was tense and not very much fun at all. But we hoped for the best.