Refinishing Hardwood Floors

Remember my friend Kelly? The girl with the awesome old house she bought for $35,000 and is fixing up room by room? Well she’s written another guest post and it’s a great overview of refinishing hardwood floors. Joey and I were so impressed by her undertaking. We have a house full of wood floors, but we’re too big of chickens to attempt refinishing them. Sure, we’ll bring a new human into the world and be responsible for its well-being, but do our own wood floors? No way! . Kudos to Kelly for the amazing work she and her friends did!

In my first post, I showed you this photo of the dirty carpet in the living room:

It was deemed un-shampoo-able so I decided to take a peek at what lay beneath. I crossed my fingers that it was something I could work with…

It’s the same hardwood flooring that’s in the bedrooms! The finish was a mess but the actual wood itself was in decent shape, so I did a little research and determined this was definitely a project I could tackle myself along with the help of my handy boyfriend, Christian. My first major project – how exciting!

The first step in refinishing hardwood is to remove all of the old stain. I moseyed on down to the local hardware store and rented a drum sander and a power edger. Drum sanders are quite easy to use but they are loud and dusty. Also while sanding, sometimes the old varnish would smoke and really stink.

Here’s Christian just finishing up with the rough sanding:

At first I thought we had a pretty good system going where Christian would go around the rooms with the edger while I used the drum sander. But then we discovered the individual planks on my floor were warped and required about four passes with the drum sander just to get all the old stain off. Christian was done with the edging way before I even had one room rough sanded. That’s when I went back to the hardware store and rented yet another drum sander.

Once the old stain was off, we switched the sanders over to fine grit sandpaper to make the wood nice and smooth.

See all of the dust? All in all, I think we spent about 20 hours pulling those drum sanders back and forth across the dining room and two bedrooms. We really had to lift up on the handle in order to grind down the warped planks and my arms and back were killing me when we were done.

After sanding, I vacuumed up the dust and began staining. First, I tested a few different colors and decided on “American Walnut” by Varathane. Next, I used a wool mop to spread on the stain.

Quit laughing. I LOVE those overalls!

Let’s look at the process one more time:

Refinishing the floors was a bit more work than I bargained for, but I’m proud of myself for having the guts to tackle such a big project. I’m enormously satisfied with the way the floors turned out and I saved a lot of money in the process. Next time, I’ll make sure to turn the heat up when I apply the polyurethane – but that’s another story!

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