Re-finishing Our Floors (our beautiful, beautiful floors!)

Before we started the whole process of re-finishing these floors, I thought that the steps seemed easy enough.Ya know…

-rip up the carpet and tack-stripping

-rent sander and sand floors

-stain

-polyurethane

EASY? Right?.... ehhhh… not so much. I mean those are the steps we followed for the most part. But reading those words online and actually doing them are very different things. Also, we had a few extra steps to take once we saw what was underneath of the carpet.

So… Step # 1:

Not even an hour after we were inside of the house after our closing… things started looking like this:

Ripping up all of the carpet was the easiest step.We hit our first speed bump, however, when we pulled back the carpet padding and saw this:

There were patches of white paint all over the living room and the dining room! The bedrooms, luckily, didn't have any paint but we did have a new problem to deal with first before we could sand! We went through a bit of trial and error about how we should get the paint up, we first tried just using a putty knife to scrape up the paint, as seen here:

This method worked... but took WAY too much time. We knew we needed something to help get the paint up more quickly. So then we used some Goo Gone & the putty knife, and had slightly better results... ummmm... sort of... 

Did I mention that Goo Gone smells awful? 

It still was taking WAY too long... we had so many paint spots to get up. If ONLY they made some kind of product specifically for getting up paint off of a surface... you know like some sort of paint... remover or something? Oh yeah... that does exist... why didn't we think of it in the first place?

So... we finally just bought some paint remover, followed the directions on the label and and most of the paint ended up coming up easily with a putty knife.

The life-saving paint remover! :D

Oh... and for about five minutes during that trial and error period, we thought we could use a hand sander to get the paint up... which resulted in this gem:

Anyway... after we got the paint up, things started looking like this:

Turns out the paint was covering "dark spots" on the floor. Our assumption is that these had been caused by pet urine, and they painted over them to "seal" out the smell when they put carpet down. We weren't too worried about the spots because we still had to sand... and we were planning to stain darker so we knew they wouldn't show up very much in the end.

 Then Zach went around and ripped up all of the tack stripping around the edges of the rooms:

We just threw all of the carpet and padding out onto the front porch, and gave it all away for free to a neighbor a couple of days later.

Then we rented a vibrating floor sander from The Home Depot, and we thought things were going to go much more quickly. Wrong again. Turns out, we should have rented a drum sander… but we didn't do this because most things that we read online warned against them, they said that we could quickly and easily ruin our floors if we didn't know what we were doing. Since we didn't know what we were doing we played it safe and got the less-intense vibrating sander.

But after spending over 3 hours in our smallest room and being NO WHERE near close to done, we decided if we wanted our floors done in less than 3 months we needed more power.

I had to go to work that day just before the drum sander was rented… but I got updates all night, and things obviously were going much better (and faster!) I’m told they did 3 passes in each room with the drum sander, with 3 different grits of sandpaper. Then they used hand-sanders to get the edges of the rooms.By the time I saw my floors again they looked like this:

The next day, my dad came over and he and Zach spent  Sunday afternoon working their tails off sweeping up all of the dust… and there was lots of dust.

LOTS of dust:

Then they started staining… and by the time they finished… things were starting to look BEAUTIFUL!

We had to wait about two days for the stain to dry and then we put on the first coat of polyurethane. The polyurethane just further beautified the floors, so shiny! 

We wanted to put 3 coats of poly on but due to time constraints (we had to be out of our apartment on the 30^th), we didn’t have time, so we ended up with two. We still plan on going back and putting a third coat on at some point… but two is fine, we just wanted the extra coat of protection to be safe!

So there ya’ have it. Our beautiful, beautiful floors…  Hope you like them… but you can’t have them… they’re mine… and we’re going to be together forever.