June 19th - June 22nd, 2008 - Penofin: The pros and cons of Penofin Oil.Apologies for this post being two weeks late. Jeremy came up
on Thursday of this week, to get a head start on finishing the floor in
Lupine that Jim put down. Here is the unfinished floor that Jeremy saw
when he arrived. 
We decided to save money, and take Jim's advice, that we should oil the floors instead of paying a professional to sand and polyurethane them. We knew we wanted to keep the light natural color, especially since there's so much dark wood already in the room. Also, pine will darken with time and exposure to light, so we didn't want to interfere with that. So, Jim suggested Penofin Oil. He said his daughter used it on her floors and it worked great. We read the message boards and poked around on the innerweb for a while, and it seemed like the way to go. The good part is that it is easy to apply, and not expensive. The bad part is that we have to reapply it fairly regularly (every couple of years). But we figured we had nothing to lose since we couldn't hurt it, and we could always hire someone to sand and poly the floors if we hated the Penofin. Jeremy had to unexpectedly prep the floors. We purposely had Jim install random width pine, and he suggested using square nails, to give it character. We loved that idea and it goes look amazing. However, on that Thursday night, when Jeremy had to sand each nail hole because of the black streaks they had left on the floors, he was not loving the square nails. He ended up working on the floors until 3 AM that night (Friday morning, really). After the sanding, he had to then use a shop vac to suck out the dust out of every nail hole. Then he was able to successfully apply the Penofin. It is easy to apply. It gets rolled on with a paint roller, and then "ticked" with a paint brush to remove the any bubbles. The directions say to leave it on for a half-hour, then wipe off the excess. Here's what the floors looked like by noon on Friday. Nice!
Oh, and the Porch roof of Equinox that we ripped off last week? Yep, it's back! Jim and crew built a new roof in a couple of days. 
Friday night I came up and we grouted the tile that we had so much fun installing last week. Here's a picture of the finished product. I think it looks terrific.
Jeremy and I spent all day Saturday applying Penofin to all of the new wood in Lupine. First, I applied clear Penofin to the new kitchen cabinet made from attic boards from our home. I used clear Penofin, same as on the pine floors, but the boards are 200+ years old (our house was built in 1800) so they are quite dark. The Penofin really brought out the color. 
We used Penofin oil stain on the trim and the posts. The color came out a bit orange-ier than I would have liked, but it will darken with time and will look better and better. Here's the before of the unfinished wood:
Here's the after pictures. It may just be the light, but the floors already seem to have darkened a bit, and more of the grain is showing through. 
Jeremy stayed up on Sunday night into Monday and worked on sanding and priming Equinox's walls. The stove shop guy from Rocky's installed Equinox's stove. Rocky's came highly recommended by several people, including Jeremy's dad. 
Next week is staging Lupine for the renters, and more priming and painting of Equinox. Posted by Laura
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