Floor Follies

I don't think the game room floor was ever treated.

What do you do when you purchase a home that is almost entirely wood floors?  Like, around 2000 square feet of wooden floors?  What do you do when those floors have obviously been neglected, and you aren't sure some of them have ever been finished?  When even the finished floors were probably last treated when the house was built forty years ago?

Our kitchen floors.  You can see how dry
and worn they were.

Obviously you sand and stain and finish all of them in the one week before you are required to move in to your new home.  Because long-term, educated, and conscientious floor finishing is for suckers.

To be fair, it only came down to this because we had the worst luck finding someone to work on our floors--the kitchen needed some boards replaced and we wanted to get them replaced before doing all the floors--I was stood up by at least three contractors and handymen, and I called even more, before finally finding someone (thanks, Angie's List!).  By the way, I have a name if you need a handyman in Georgia.

We also don't really have money to just throw in the air, much less to either hire someone to sand and refinish 2000 square feet, or even to rent a sander for an extended period.

So we sanded the entire floor in one very, very long and exhausting day.  I have never, ever, had muscles as sore as mine were the next morning.  Everywhere.  My legs were sore.  My sides were sore.  My arms were sore.  The pads on my hands were sore.

Sanding my son's room.  Note how much
dust is being kicked into the air.

Meet Steve.

To sand the floor we rented an orbital sander.  It has a base fee (ours was per day, hence the need to finish within 24 hours), then you pay $2 for each sheet of sandpaper, and you go through around one or two per room.  Generally you start at a very low grain count, like 35, and then you pass through with a 60 count, and finally a 100 count.  Between each you need to clean the floors of the wood dust, preferably with a shop vacuum, like my new friend Steve.  Sadly, Steve has to go back to his owner, but I am a huge fan of shop vacs now.

The title of this post is no accident.  I had no idea how to sand, stain, or finish floors before I started this project.  I watched many videos, but none of them covered how to do it fast on such a large scale, and there were practically none that discussed staining.  I found tutorials for staining furniture.  So I knew to wipe on, wipe off, and that was pretty much it.

So much dust after each sanding.

I tried what I'd lucked into with my refrigerator--asking a person at Lowe's.  However, this particular Lowe's guy wasn't as helpful.  I got a vague notion of wiping on and off with lamb's wool (using a wooden applicator that made it more like mopping), bought the wool and went home, thinking that it would be no big deal to stain 2000 square feet--I mean, it'll be just like mopping, right?  Surely we'd quickly mop the stain down and back up, then apply polyurethane and in just a good 12 hours or so we'd have perfectly smooth and matching floors to enjoy.

Turns out it's nothing like mopping.  I know.  You're shocked.

If I were to take on a task like this again, this is what I'd do:
1. Make sure you have plenty of stain.  It doesn't really take that much to wipe on and off.
2. Hand-paint the stain, or use a lamb wool applicator, but only in small patches.
3. Wipe off stain with T-shirt rags (a package of 80 available at Lowe's for about $20).
4. Appreciate how much more easily I stained a floor this time.

Son's room before.

Son's room after.

However, instead, I started laying stain with my lamb wool mop, tried to wipe it off with the mop, realized that the mop got saturated really, really, really fast, paced around a bit trying to figure out what to do, remembered the aforementioned rag package, and told my husband, working in another room, that I was running to buy it.  By the time I got back, the stain had set enough I could in no way wipe any of it up.  So I got to artfully finish that room without wiping stain, but keeping it as smooth and even as I could.  It ended up at least five times as dark as I'd planned to go.

The game room floor was so transformed by
sanding it that we decided not to stain it.

On the up side, it actually is an attractive accident.  The ceiling and one wall in my son's room are wood, a light color, and this keeps it from being monotonous in there.  Just check out those before and after images!

Anyway, we ended up only staining a few rooms and leaving everything else alone to save our backs and our sanity.

Lastly, after staining, we added three coats of polyurethane to all the floors and an extra coat to floors with extra traffic.  We chose to use water-based because it doesn't yellow over time, it dries more quickly, and it doesn't have a strong smell.  We added polyurethane and Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday that week.  It was super awesome.  I got new muscles in my shoulders from the mopping motion (the only part that was like mopping).

The game room floor with polyurethane.
I'm sorry I didn't take shots of the same
part of the floor.

Some notes:
Our floors are really old.  Some of them are for sure original floors.  They have extra-worn spaces where the most traffic has been, and while they looked better when we sanded them (we thought we'd removed the darker spots), when we stained, the dark spots came right back.  So be aware that some wear and tear may not be removed.  I'm overall okay with that--I really like the sort of worn, earthy appeal of these old floors.

The house has been added onto.  So different floors are made of different types of wood.  That meant significant color differences despite the same stain.  That was another thing that influenced our decision to leave some floors alone.

Now we have a bunch of really great and really different floors.  I actually am happier with them this way than I would have been had we successfully stripped and stained them all to look the same.  Why buy a house with character and hide all of the character?