Refinishing Our Floors Pt.3

Finishing
Finally, the last and most satisfying phase of refinishing our floors. The final rounds of sanding were bittersweet. This is what the floors originally looked like when the home was first built and before they were treated with a thick, dark lacquer. 
Again, you can see the lovely plywood used in the upstairs as a filler. 

We decided to go with a natural, water-based polyurethane with no added tint. The previous homeowner recommended we use Varathane brand (now owned by Rust-oleum). He said it was by far, the easiest to work with and was a self-leveling, long-lasting hard finish. I was absolutely clueless what any of that meant anyways but sure enough, Varathane receives glowing reviews online and I am glad I went with them. You can also see all the different products you'll need to ensure a professional looking, refinished floor. 

You'll need the following: 

Varathane Satin Water-Based Diamond Polyurethane Finish (1gl per room) 

Pole Longarm Extension (multi-purpose tool: sanding/finishing/painting/drywall!)

Plastic Pole Sander (cheap, plastic ones work just fine) 

Varathane Applicator (go high quality on this so you don't see little fibers everywhere)

Mineral Spirits

Tack Cloth (Pack of 6) 

3M Sanding Screens (100 or 220 grit)

Wooster Shortcut Angle Brush (I just LOVE these brushes for everything)
Knee Pads or Thick Cardboard
New Pair of Sythentic Socks (non-cotton)

The Process: 
So I'm not sure if I have any photos of the process of actually applying the floor finish. At this point, I believe my wife was busy at the old apartment boxing things up or working on grading papers. In any case, I'll detail the tedious/perfectionist steps I took to ensure the best results possible.

You'll be excited at this point but if you haven't already -- fill in any holes now. Don't use the sandy wood filler stuff from Minwax, buy the smooth puddy version. You'll fill in random nail and staple holes from the carpet strips. Don't worry about any gaps in the flooring but you may want to take a flat-head screwdriver and the shop-vac back out to clean them out now depending mostly on how gross it looks. 

The biggest thing is being patient and allowing enough time on a Saturday or Sunday to have the whole day to work on this project. That includes going out to lunch between coats. I decided to split my time between the upstairs and downstairs and utilize my time equally between the two. 

First, you'll need to shop vac the whole room. See those curtains in the photos? They are COVERED in fine wood dust. See all the wood trim? See the radiators? Dust everywhere. Shop-Vac everything and take everything down. You'll be thankful you did. After vacuuming, you can slip on your knee pads or find a piece of forgiving thick cardboard to spend a good deal of time on the floor. You'll be using the mineral spirits and your tack cloth on the whole room. Starting at the corner and slowly work make passes across the whole room top to bottom. After each pass, you'll need to shake out your tack cloth in a designated corner and re-fold it when necessary. 

After that, you can start pouring! I just dumped globs right on the floor and worked it in. Do your best to ensure you're working with the wood grain and evenly spread it out. There's some debate on the internet regarding how many coats you should add and how thick each coat should be. I went with four thin coats and a thicker one to finish. 

See that line? We couldn't get it out - maybe a piano was slid across the floor at one point? Who knows. By the way, something I didn't think of at the time was what to put on my feet? My feet might as well be tack cloths because they picked up everything. I opted to use sacrifice some synthetic socks for the sake of the project -- cotton ended up sticking and leaving threads.

So, on the can it will give you recommended drying times between each coat. Again, humidity can play a big role. After completing this process in the upstairs and eating lunch, it was time to apply the second coat downstairs. This is where my perfectionist/OCD tendancies came into play. You don't HAVE to sand between coats. Especially if you're going to put on thin ones but I did anyways. I took a super fine drywall  sanding screens and swept the floors with them. Now I had to repeat the whole tack cloth/mineral spirits process over again. I just felt like this would help to acheive the best floor possible. In hindisght, I would recommend maybe one sanding in the middle coats. 

I'm glad I split my time between rooms because by the time I was done sanding and snacking downstairs, it was time to re-apply the next coat upstairs. Overall, I think it turned out fantastic. I'd recommend waiting at least two days if you have time and it hasn't been especially humid before you start moving furniture into place. This stuff hardened up really nice but I still wouldn't go throwing down any rugs for a while. 

Now it was really starting to look like home. We even moved the bed upstairs and decided to spend our first night together in the house.   Warm and invitingMorning coffee 

Refinishing Our Floors Pt.2

So with the floor cleaned up, we come to our next (and most challenging) phase of this project -- sanding. Ugh. We rented our sanders locally and I incorrectly assumed I could smash out this project in two days flat. We ended up renting the equipment for double that and with the help of friends and family, we worked on these floors all weekend and into the next week. The thick carpet glue and thick lacquer finish were mostly to blame. (they never showed that part on Fixer Upper!)  

 

Prep: 
Tape up any rooms you don't want dust in because most of it will go into the bag but the rest of it will be everywhere. Watch Youtube videos or talk to any fellow homeowners who have already sanded their floors. They will provide you with a wealth of information and advice. 

*Be warned: anyone can upload a Youtube video so make sure you watch a number of videos as this Simon Cowell of wood sanding will love to share with you.










Tips: 

• We've been told countless times to avoid random orbital sanders so we went with a highly rated belt sander. 
• Purchase the coarsest sandpaper available (30-40 grit) and don't worry, you'll gradually polish it out to the fine stuff. You'll need quite a few of these because they'll all gook up with all the melted lacquer finish and/or carpet gum. 
• Purchase more sandpaper than you need (6 sheets of each grit at least). Check to make sure your store allows returns for unused pieces.
• Rent your machines as early as you can -- you'll only need the belt sander for the first day but if you're feeling ambitious or you only have one room to work on, you could also rent the handheld edger.
• By the way, these buggers are heavy. Get help anytime you lift them upstairs or into your truck.
• My wife was happy she had a face mask -- the 3m filters were coated with fine wood dust. I'm sure I probably inhaled an unhealthy amount during the process. 

I've uploaded videos below of the techniques we used for sanding. The biggest thing is to remember you must have continuous movement and tapering off when meeting in the middle of your floor, otherwise, you'll most certainly have sanding marks or impressions in your floor.

Refinishing Our Floors Pt.1

Although I was quite certain our house has wood floors throughout, I wasn't positive what kind of flooring we'd find underneath the carpets upstairs (we've seen basic planks used in older homes upstairs). There was a very exciting HGTV Chip/Joanna feeling pulling them up for sure! 

We had some debate whether or not to remove the early 2000's beige carpeting in the master bedroom but ultimately decided to remove it, not knowing what challenges lay ahead. As you can probably see, there used to be two bedrooms at one point. The floors looked just fine on one side but there was an exceptional amount of old carpet glue and thousands of staples/nails on the other. Luckily for us, all the flooring was the same throughout the house -- old growth maple with some curly and tiger eye thrown in randomly here and there!

Another thing you will notice is the plywood was used to fill the gaps in the middle where the old wall used to be --not a pretty sight that we'll need to address in the future! This part of the project chewed up our fingers pretty good -- you certainly never see this on HGTV! Safety glasses and work gloves were an absolute must for this portion of the cleanup. Countless times I had staples come shoot right up into my face. I would also highly recommend several different size crowbars, a hammer, pliers and a flat head screwdriver for this project. 



Next up, sanding! 

 

 Prepare for hours of this.

Cya carpet!