Refinishing Our 100 Year Old Floors

This has been a LONG winter!  A LONG almost project-free winter.  It’s too cold to spray paint or work in the unheated garage, and quite honestly, it takes a whole lot of effort to even leave the house these days.  Because of that, I’ve been staring at these same four walls for a long time and dreaming of projects I can get my hands into.  Well, a couple weeks ago, My Better Half and I had the house to ourselves for a day, a cold, super snowy day.  We were vegging on the couch watching a marathon of my favorite home improvement show, when enough of doing nothing struck, and the idea to start something BIG, hit hard!

Next thing I knew, My Better Half was removing the carpet in our living room to see what we hadn’t seen for probably 15 years… the 100 year old wood floors beneath.

Now, I’ve seen some disgusting carpet.  Do you remember my basement steps carpet, the carpet we tore up to add the basement step storage?  Well, this carpet was not as bad, but quite honestly, I was shocked at the dirt under the carpet and the dust and junk in the air as we were removing the carpet from the house.  My Better Half had to go out and snow blow just to make a path to take the carpet to the garage until we can dispose of it.

The newly exposed floor was not as bad as I was expecting, but certainly in the need of serious work.

So, we hired a professional floor refinisher…NOT!!!  Of course we did NOT do that!!  We simply rented a floor sander.  It was only $42 for the entire day….PLENTY of time to sand down this floor.

Before we started the sanding job, we moved all the furniture out and put up plastic to seal off the room.  I’m SO glad we did this!  We had saw dust everywhere after the job was over…I can’t imagine how bad it would be if we didn’t put the plastic up.

And so the sanding progressed through 100 years of varnish and stain.  From 80 grit gradually up to a 120 grit, the floors started looking better and better.

There were low spots and dings and dents that we had to address with a palm sander but it really wasn’t bad at all.

The floor has some “age spots” that we are going to leave alone.  To me, they just add character to the floor.

Once the stain was completely removed and the floor was bare, it was BEAUTIFUL!

Now we have a clean slate and can start the staining process… It’s gonna be SO good!!

But for now, I have a ton of dust to clean!  Be sure to follow along to see all the updates on this project and all our other upcoming DIYs.  Spring is coming…that means projects, lots and lots of projects!!

Happy DIYing,