Floors – hammer and stitches

The upstairs floors are 100% done, and they look Awesome! Now that it’s all said and done the floors were not really a hard project, but a very very tedious project. Sanding all the edges by hand required a lot of patience, but it felt good to finally check that off the list. Next step, cleaning, lots and lots of cleaning. As one would assume, it creates quite a mess. After our first round of sanding we came downstairs to find the entire living room covered in a thin layer or dust.

Once the floors were as clean as we could possibly get them it was time to stain. When we finally arrived at this step both Seth and myself were extremely nervous. It was a lot of build up getting to this point, and this is the part that would really show if we did a horrible job, or what if the color we chose was actually terrible in a large space? Thankfully neither of those things turned out to be true. In fact it was the easiest part of this whole project, very much like The Karate Kid, “wax on, wax off”. We got a nice rhythm going, Seth would wipe the stain into the floor and I would follow a minute after and wipe it off.

I think it only took us a little more than 2 hours to apply stain to the entire second floor, not bad. Then we took a break. It was a nice excuse to do nothing since we had to wait for the stain to dry and couldn’t be upstairs. Lastly, it was time for the polyurethane. So this is the quickest step in the floor process, but I would say the easiest to make mistakes. The polyurethane simply gets wiped on with an applicator that looks a lot like a mop. The tricky part is making sure you don’t miss spots and that it doesn’t pool anywhere. Seth took responsibility for the majority of this step, which I was totally okay with. He did a great job 🙂

Two coats of polyurethane later the floors were done! Again we were able to a take long break since we couldn’t walk on them for seven days. It is very liberating to actually not be able to work on any projects, I was happy for the week off. So now after the bathroom, that was the second hardest project upstairs. It should only get easier from here…fingers crossed.

It’s time for floors! When we bought the house the floors were a major selling point. We both love hardwood, and honestly I love hardwood that has a few dings and dents, adds character and such. The refinishing process is well worth the work. Months ago we started sanding, but we’ve kind of been off and on. This is really the opposite of how one should finish their floors. But here we are.

Over Thanksgiving we finally tackled the most intimidating step, patching the damaged area of the floors with new boards. I think maybe we subconsciously wanted to wait until we upped our handy skills, and we really have. The hole in our master bedroom left from removing the old closet is gone! Thanks to a short This Old House video it wasn’t the hardest thing we’ve done.

I think we accomplished our goal of making it look like there was never a whole in first place. The trickiest part is getting the boards out to feather in the new ones, without breaking any around them…we only broke a few surprisingly. The key is the split the old board so it can come out in pieces. I’ve learned I need to not be afraid to hit things with a hammer ten times as hard as I think I need to.

Also we did find new oak, but without making a special order, all the boards we found in store have finish, yay more sanding :). It was a fun scavenger hunt to try and sift through and find the perfect board for the least amount of cutting waste. Overall I think it turned out brilliantly.

So now we have to just finish the last bits of sanding before we can start staining, this weekend’s goal. We did pick out the stain and get all the supplies for the polyurethane. We went with the middle color, not too light, not too dark. I’ve finally convinced Seth that painting our bedroom walls navy is a good idea, so I didn’t want the floors to be too dark.