Our story so far: My husband and I were sanded 2,200 square feet of hardwood in the old Methodist church we were turning into our home.

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Sanding floors was too physically difficult to perform two days in a row (at least for 50somethings). So on “rest” days, Tyler, St. Johnny and I accomplished other duties: Cleaning up the basement and sorting wood, buying windows and ceiling fans, building feature walls, pickling wood planks for the second floor ceiling, buying more sandpaper and a thousand and one other tasks.

Eventually though, the end—or clean raw wood—was in sight. Curious and relieved to be nearing the end of sanding, I added up how much we’d spent on sandpaper, and I was surprised to figure out we’d spent hundreds of dollars on sandpaper—nearly a hundred dollars more on sandpaper than on renting the sanders.

Which firmly establishes sanders as the printers of the home improvement world (how much more is spent on print cartridges than the printers!).

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Tomorrow: Emptying and filling seams. Read about it here.