Floor Refinishing, Part 1

This week-end we tackled the refinishing of the floors in the two guest rooms upstairs. It pretty much took us all day Saturday (we got a Miran Makas start at 2:00 pm and quit about 10:00 pm) and Sunday we worked from 10:00 until 4:00. We only made it through the sanding and clean up and still have the polyurethaning left to go.

For dramatic effect I'll start with photos of the  rooms before we started and how they look now - sanded and ready for finishing. Then I'll post the play by play photos. In the after photos the floors are wet from being mopped so you can get a sense how they'll look when they are refinished. Its going to be so great - we are proud of ourselves and very excited!

 The first step was dealing with some rather serious gouges in the floors of both rooms - which we sanded and then filled with wood filler.

 Then we went to Home Depot and rented a buffer/sander, which the guy talked us into because he said its all we would need. But it wasn't tough enough. It did an ok job on the flat surface of each board of wood, but it would actually pull up any wood so we were left with white stripes of paint in the cracks between practically every board. I was following Miran with a hand sander to get the cracks, but that was crazy inefficient.

So we went back to Home Depot and rented the orbital sander we had wanted in the first place, it did a better job of actually sanding down the wood and getting more of the paint, but there was still a lot we had to do by hand - of course along the walls, but also some stubborn spots in the middle of the rooms.

As we still had the less intense sander, we used it with the finer grit sandpaper to do the final sanding. Plus I wanted to include this picture of me - even though I look pretty terrible - this was at 10:00 pm when we were ready to quit on Saturday night and I'm filthy and exhausted. We actually took turns on everything and both did every step, but I seemed to be the only one taking pictures so it looks like Miran was doing all the work. So Miran took this picture of me at the end of the day.

When Miran gets home tonight we are going to do the first coat of polyurethane, but we have to decide what to do with the spots we filled with wood filler because they look terrible. We've bought a variety of wood stain pens and colors to try to stain them to look like the wood, but they don't. So now they just look like ridiculous white spots, or brown spots in the case of the ones we stained. So before we put hte finish down, we are going to have to do something about these. I kind of want to pull the wood filler out. I think a gouge the same color as the rest of the floor would look better than these spots.