Redoing Your Floors Is NOT A Weekend Project

We discovered the hard, slow, and painful way that redoing your hardwood floors is NOT a weekend project. It is not a week-long project either. It is more like a two week one. Our floor quite literally has our blood, sweat, and hair in it. Who would have thought something that looks "so easy" would be so time consuming. Still, I would rather do the work myself than pay someone else $7,000 to do it for us. Here is our floor journey. First, this is where we started:

Day 1
Realize that you cannot possibly hand sand the entire floor using a Porter + Cable orbital sander. Not only will you have to change the sheets of sandpaper, but you have to sand the same spot several times. Give up! Rent a sander!

We found a round buffer sander for $21 for 4 hours or $31 for an entire day. Sounded cheap enough. We then had to pay for a red pad ($9.99) and four sheets of two grades of sandpaper: 36 grit ($9.99/sheet) and 60 grit ($8.99/sheet). Regardless, it was money well spent. We started sanding with the rented sander at around 1:30 in the afternoon; the floor was finally sanded to our standards by 10:00 pm. First, we went around the whole floor using the 36 grit sandpaper. This did a good job removing the old varnish, but left some weird black streaks on the floor.

Second, we went over the entire floor again, but this time we used the 60 grit sandpaper. It did a really good job smoothing out the floor, removing the last bits of varnish and most of the black streaks. We had to do some touching up with hand sander around the edges and in some spots where the big sander seems to have trouble. All in all, we thought that the floor looked pretty good - especially once we were all done vacuuming it and called it quits for the day.

Not too shabby, if I say so myself! I'll be honest, I was really tempted to leave the floors the natural color. It just looked so clean and nice. The dear hubby still wanted to stain the floors in keeping with our restoration goals. We have decided that we might leave the bedroom floors upstairs the lighter color, but are not sure yet. Why are we having so much trouble making up our minds? Well, we really love our stain color!

Day 2
Even though we thoroughly vacuumed the floor, and wiped it down with microfiber cloths, we learned a very important lesson here. You must use some sort of denatured alcohol or some other liquid to remove all those minute little particles that you cannot see with the naked eye. If you skip this step (as we, unfortunately did) all those little tiny minuscule mites of dust will magically appear as soon as you put on your first coat of polyurethane. Anyway, after wiping down and cleaning the floor really well (or so we thought), I added the stain with a paintbrush. We had tested the stain in a small corner the night before, but there was nothing to wipe off, so we decided to use a paintbrush and spread the stain very thinly with minimal overlap. We wanted good coverage and we had already discovered that our boards were thirsty.

Isn't that just a beautiful color? It looked so nice and we were thrilled with our decision. So we just let the floor stay and waited for the stain to dry.

Day 3
And waited for the stain the dry.

Day 4
And waited for the stain to dry.

Day 5
At this point, I admit, we were getting a little nervous and were wondering if the stain was ever going to dry. I mean, we expected a few delays since the temperature skyrocketed to 75 degrees and we had rain. The subsequent stifling humidity meant it would take longer. But four days! Come on! So we did a little bit more research and discovered that really dark stains (like ours) can take twice as long to dry! What?! So, we waited patiently some more.

Day 6
Yeah! The stain is finally dry, or so we debated. My wonderful husband wanted to wait another day just to be sure. I did not. The weather was perfect - not too hot or humid - for putting on the polyurethane. I won the day and put on the first coat.

It looked a little weird when we put it on. I mean, the surface was all ripply from the lambskin paint roller. I confess, I was very nervous and wondering if my husband was right. I had put on the polyurethane just before bedtime and by morning, this was the glorious sight.

Day 7
I was in love and doing the happy dance. I did not even notice the funny little bits in the polyurethane. I simply rolled on the second coat and thought we were done. Finished. Ready for the next project.

I just had to let the floor dry for 24 hours or more to cure the final coat. Apparently, my husband was not as satisfied as I was and had some issues with the little bumps caused by the missed grit. Sigh.

Day 8
Do absolutely nothing to the floor but admire it (me) and debate the merits of what we should do next to fix the grits (my husband). We did some more reading and research. A lot of it. We found some really great sites with lots of advice - the main one being do not do this at home yourself and why staining is a bad idea. We test a few things we had around the house, including a brown paper bag, scotch rite cleaning pads, and 100 grit sandpaper. The results were, well, scary. We finally discovered a site written by a woman that had done a lot of floors. She recommended that we sand the polyurethane floor very well with 1000 grit sandpaper.

Did you know that they even made this kind of sandpaper? I didn't. Learn something new every day.

Anyway, she recommended that you sand the polyurethane really well, clean it very thoroughly and then put on the next coat of polyurethane. So we planned a trip to Home Depot.

Day 9
I had a nice long list of things that I wanted from Home Depot anyway, so we made the trip worth our while. We purchased all the woodwork we needed to install the baseboard, board and batten, and chair rails. We also purchased another gallon of our floor polyurethane. I even found a sanding attachment for my extension pole so I would not have to sand the floor on my hands and knees. And my wonderful hubby bought me a nail gun. Oh the projects I will build! I was happy (even though I was coming home to work on the never-ending floor).

After we came home and unloaded everything, I rigged up my little sandpaper holder to the extender pole and discovered that the sand paper strips were about two inches too short. Really! Come on! I did not give up. I taped that stupid paper down good and went to work sanding the entire floor. Over and over and over again until it and I were covered with dust. Then it was time to get on my hands and knees and wipe down the entire floor with a damp cloth. In a stroke of brilliance (if I say so myself), I rigged a microfiber cloth to the sandpaper holder and polished that floor as well as I possibly could. No little grit mites were going to ruin my floor. I finally put on the third coat of polyurethane. And went to bed. I was too tired to even take a picture.

Day 10
We checked the floor again as soon as we woke up. This was becoming monotonously routine. But actually, we were pretty pleased. The sanding tip worked and removed about 75% percent of the imperfections we had seen in the previous coats of polyurethane. The larger ones were knocked down a bit but still visible. At this point, we exhaustedly agreed  to do one final coat of polyurethane. Most people stop at three coats but because this is our home and we only want to do the floors once in our lifetime (should I mention that we have seven more floors to go) we decided to do four coats. The floor had washed up very nicely with just the two coats, but we are pretty rough on our floors. They get mopped a lot. And we have dogs that have puppies. That floor needs a lot of protection. So four coats. Yep. We agreed and it was done.

Day 11
The floor is finally dry. We are just letting it cure very well before we protect it with brown paper while we work on our other projects. I must say, we are happy with the final result. And, on to the next project.