refinishing floors!!
Our 100-plus-year-old house comes with so many wonderful surprises. One of the best surprises was the beautiful door hardware we uncovered from beneath years of gunked-up paint.
some of the less pleasant surprises include the draft in our kitchen (seriously, makes us think the walls are made of cardboard behind the cabinets??), the troublesome plumbing (which we’ve fixed, over a painful few years and many hundreds of dollars of services), and an incredibly clogged gutter that caused water to leak into our front wall (also fixed, thank the gods).
actual footage of us as we tore down the walls and assessed the damage
Somewhere in the middle, there’s the floors.
We are blessed/cursed with what we can only assume are original pine floors that run through most of the first floor (we’ll see if the kitchen has ‘em, but I’m doubtful as it seems to have been added on later).
We’ve been refinishing them ourselves, room by room, as we have the time and money to do it. which brings me to Our third successful floor refinishing adventure: the dining room.
WHAT’S GOIN’ ON
the fall 2021 one room challenge™ kicked off september 30. it’s a twice-a-year chance for designers of all experience levels get together to cheer one another on in our quests to finish one room in eight weeks. it’s not a competition - just a way to build community among diyers and professional designers alike. the challenge is all about peeling back the curtain and showing the process.
you can find other participants’ entries on the one room challenge™ website.
I feel like the list gets a little shorter each week, but not by as much as I would expect. We ORCers are SERIOUS!!!
so is it like, hard?
Refinishing floors is backbreaking work, and truly isn’t that much more expensive to outsource. For us, it is more about controlling the schedule, and the adventure of learning a new skill. Also, since our floors aren’t in the best condition to begin with, we figured, we couldn’t make them any worse.
The first time we tried refinishing the floor was actually upstairs. I was too nervous/intimidated to rent a drum sander and do things properly, and decided it would definitely be possible to accomplish the sanding with a random orbital sander.
Now, I didn’t know at the time that there was a different, much larger, orbital sander that is actually used on floors. I bought a hand sander, and did an insane amount of work trying to lift the brown paint(?) and vinyl glue(!!) off the floor, to little avail. Instead, we were left with something that was at least roughed-up enough to poly... so we did that, and decided it was good enough for now.
For attempt number two, we got the orbital sander made for floors. After 7-plus hours of sanding we were seeing no results. So we did some more googling and realized the orbital sander is like a finishing sander - first, because we had paint and goo all over our floors, we were gonna need a drum sander.
We were out of time and put the project on hold for a week to try it out again with the proper tools. The drum sander did what we needed it to - it ripped off all the layers of paint and gunk like - well, not quite like magic, but it did the job. We were still left with a ring of stuff around the edge of the floor, and some pockets in the room where the floors weren’t even enough for the drum sander to reach. That is where the aptly named floor edger came in handy.
Braxton told me using “edge” as a verb is an innuendo so I’m going to avoid doing that, but what do you do, when floor edger is the thing’s name.
Anyway.
The edges taken care of, we brought out the trusty old hand sander to try to get some of the more stubborn paint spots out of the grooves of the floor. While it does the job, too, it’s probably the dustiest, hardest task in the lineup. There just seems to be no end in sight - it’s long, gradual work. In this first room, we didn’t do the best job getting rid of every little speck, but it was a huge improvement over what the drum sander and floor edger did on their own.
FINALLY, it was time to bring back the random orbital floor sander. Now that the paint and other gunk was removed, the orbital sander could do her job and get the floor evened out and lookin’ fresh.
the dark brown streaks are what we tried to get with the hand sander. Also, you can see we went with plastic wrap as protective sheeting during this first honest attempt; it was semi effective at keeping dust out until you bump it and it rips… so…
The smell was amazing - as I said, the floors are pine, and so every time we got into the actual floorboards (vs. sanding off paint), it was like walking through a winter wonderland. Maybe that means we sanded too much, but we’re learning at this point.
(I honestly can’t remember how much we tried the hand sander on this first go-round with the proper tools. We must have used it a little bc it looks pretty good in here.)
After the sanding is done, we vacuumed. vacuumed again. Just kept on vacuuming until we got bored, because there was so much dust, we could have gone on for days.
Once the dust was as gone as we could get it, it was time to lay down some polyurethane. We have used both regular and fast-drying polyurethane; I don’t see much difference in how they end up looking or working. We didn’t try any fancy stains, just laid the poly clear coat over the pine floors. They became more orange than I was expecting, but it inspired my totally orange parlor room / office, so all good in the end. Honestly, they really warm up the whole house. I came around to them.
Ok, if you haven’t run away by now, maybe you’re interested in another DIY recipeh. In that case, read on. The following is our time tested method that we applied to the dining room which includes many learnings from the orange room above and our living room… plus a little hallway I did mostly by hand.
ahem.
Ingredients
for prep:
polyethylene sheeting (to close off entries and vents)
bandana
old clothes
if you’re removing carpet:
utility knife (to cut carpet)
dust mask (skip if you have the respirator)
hammer and/or rubber mallet
pliers (needlenose is great for removing staples)
contractor bags (do not skimp, there will be nails and you do not need to cut yourself with those)
for sanding:
random orbital sander (hand sander)
drum sander/belt sander* and coarse sandpaper (40 grit)
floor edger* and coarse sandpaper (40)
orbital floor sander* and three kinds of sandpaper: coarse (36), medium (80), and fine (100)
for staining/polyurethane work:
respirator with vapor filters
scrap cardboard
paint stirrer
floor stain (if you wish it, I would recommend buying it with poly included)
Polyurethane (to seal and protect; even if you stain you may want to do another coat of this alone)
wide brush like these or this (you can also use a thing on a pole, but that didn’t give me the control I needed to see where the dust and gunk was appearing out of the floor boards again)
brush cleaner (yeah this isn’t even an amazon link bc you can’t buy the right stuff online)
*recommend renting; your rental place will also have the paper you need.
Recipe
Prep the room and yourself (1-3 hours). Remove all furniture, stuff on the walls, open the windows. If you are removing carpet, here are some quick tips on what that will entail:
check your garbage pickup rules and cut the carpet in widths that your trash collectors will accept. Roll up the carpet and secure with duct tape.
Remove tack strips carefully using pry bars and hammer or rubber mallet. on our floors, the tack strips included larger tacks than normal which needed a hammer/pliers to remove. Have all your tools at the ready!
Scan the floor for stray nails, staples; remove them with pliers/pry bar. It will go faster with the pry bar, but pliers are handy for stubborn ones.
In our old home, we had a little bumper on the baseboards; remove this carefully with the pry bar and keep it handy to reinstall after you’re done, if you want (we just left it off bc ours was so old it didn’t remove very cleanly). The purpose of these were to keep people’s old timey shoes from scuffing the actual baseboards themselves.
seal the room (1 hour). Use poly sheeting and duct tape to THOROUGHLY seal off all entryways and vent openings; also, cover electrical outlets. This will take about an hour and you will thank yourself for every minute you spent doing it.
Sanding stage I (3-4 hours): Drum/belt sander. talk to your rental place and reference videos on YouTube about the right sander combination to use. We needed to remove paint, glue, (from vinyl), etc., which will only come off with a coarse grit and TONS of heavy pressure you will get from the drum sander. Here is an amazing YouTube video that helped me understand the purpose of the different sanders and why they were each so important to the process. bonus points, he has a great accent. but again, ask your local professionals and get their opinions too.
Sanding stage II (2-3 hours): Edge sander. Since the drum/belt sander only goes so close to the wall, the edge sander is necessary to get, uh, well, the edges. Using the edge sander involves a kind of crab walk move, lots of lifting and carefully setting down the sander. I recommend, again, talking to people about the specific machine you are renting and getting tips from them. You can do all the YouTube research you want but DO ask questions when you rent the machine and have them show you all the ropes. We also used the edge sander to hit spots around the room that the drum sander didn’t reach.
Sanding stage ii-a (as many hours as you choose to devote): hand sander. We definitely needed this step because our floors are a million (a hundred) years old and super irregular. The hand sander with a 40 grit paper got most all the stray paint and gunk off the floor that the professional machines didn’t reach. Is there a better way to do this? Maybe, but I don’t know yet. Enlighten me if you do!!
sanding stage III (3 hours): orbital sander. This is what people think of when they think of sanding floors. At least I got that impression from my initial research. You’ll take about 1 hour per pass of a 10x12 or so room. Go over the room with three kinds of grit - coarse, medium, and fine. This is important. Don’t skip steps! Watch the YouTube video above if you are thinking at all about skipping. And then don’t skip.
cleanup (1 hour). Whoa, congrats!! You are done sanding!!! Vacuum the heck out of your room with the shop vac. Before you poly, I recommend also using a brush attachment to really dig into the cracks between floorboards and ensure you have all the dust outta there. Don’t forget walls, window screens, and the poly sheets - they are all coated with dust by now and that could fall all over your beautiful poly coats.
Time to seal (x = (1 hour of work + 12 hours of wait time) x coats of poly)). Ok, for this step read the directions on your polyurethane and/or stain. Follow those, don’t generalize! I have heard that turning on your heat will help seal the poly. I did that, and from experience, may I remind you to ensure your vents are STILL SEALED with plastic sheets before you do this. Ah, heh heh.
let the poly set (usually about 24 hours for the cautious).
clean the walls one last time and mop the floor (1 hour). Dust will be settling for a little while, so don’t beat yourself up if you notice more settling on the walls you just cleaned. Use a microfiber cloth (don’t use water, it will just spread the mess) on the walls. You can mop your shiny new floors with murphy’s floor cleaner. I do not recommend a Swiffer WetJet; those may look convenient but they always leave streaks. A proper mop does the job right.
after the floors are dry, Install furniture ‘n’ such (1-2 hours). you can finally live in here again!!!! ENJOY!!!!!!!
At any point you are resting/enjoying downtime during this process, please remember to hydrate and stretch. this is HARD WORK! I would recommend doing steps 3, 4, and 5 with a friend, and splitting the work into two days (e.g. drum sander/edger day 1, orbital day 2). Getting it all done in one day could be possible, but highly physically punishing.
Are you going to try refinishing your floors? Did I goof up some instructions?? I want to know! Find me on IG @ariellemirandagoldberg and show me what you’re up to.
