The first room we tackled was the living room. In fact the day of signing, after work Care and I went and pulled up all of the carpet in the house. It was quite rewarding and fantastic. We knew there was hardwood floor underneath but weren't able to tell what the condition of it was. We were pleasantly surprised that the floors were actually in pretty darn good shape!
This is what we started out with. The carpet was in great shape, but we both agreed that we wanted to expose the hardwood.
Once the carpet came up, I was surprised at how wonderful the floors looked, and they are the original tongue and groove oak floors. However, we were left with LOTS AND LOTS of staples and tack strip. We went by hand and used a flat head screw driver and a pry bar and pulled up every last staple, and loose nail. Once we got on our hands and knees we realized the floors needed to be redone, and haven't been touched since the house was built. There were a lot of worn places, but there weren't any boards that needed to be replaced. Neither one of us have done anything like this before so we got lucky not biting off more than we could chew with floors that are still in great shape. This picture was taken the night that we signed on the house
There were theses awful fake wood built-ins that had to go, I tried to think of ways of keeping them or refacing them, but we ultimately decided that it would just be easier to rip them out and make the fireplace the focal point. We discovered some creative wiring done by the previous owners in the process. (To be addressed at a later date) I think the room looks a lot better without them
Two and a half weeks later of staple pulling and tack strip removing we had finally gotten to a point where we could sand. Carey rented a orbital sander and we got to work. Using 60 grit pads first. (We went through soooooo many sanding pads, the polyurethane gummed them up pretty quickly) After we did 60, we moved to 80 and then finished to 100. There was a definite learning curve with these floors. It was a lot of trial and error.
Because the floors weren't perfectly straight, the sander couldn't get every piece of wood. We recruited Carey's wonderful family and a few friends to go by hand and get every last bit of polyurethane off.
Here is a close up of what the bare floors looked like. You can see some polyurethane so we would have to go by hand and get the little pieces that poked through.
We did the entire upstairs at one time, with the staple removal, carpet pulling and sanding. The picture above was after a month or so of owning the house. Mind you, Carey and I work multiple jobs, and work 7 days a week, and we were getting married 2 weeks after the house was closed. To say we had a lot on our plates would be an understatement!
Next up was STAIN!
I did the staining on my own originally. I have never stained anything before and it was complete trial and error and lots of tears and anger went into that floor in the beginning.
We wanted a dark stain, because our walls are going to be grey and we wanted them to really pop! In the picture below they don't look that bad, but I did a second coat, and applied to much stain and the floors became tacky. I was working in too big of sections and the stain wasn't getting wiped off in time. That was just the beginning of the stain madness. Dust got into my stain and left bubbles on the floor. Bubbles you couldn't really see until the floor was dry. So we had bubbled, tacky and too dark of floors. It was a nightmare. This was the point were we felt like we had bitten off more than we could chew.
After 3 weeks of trying to figure out how to get rid of the tackiness and the bubbles. (I tried everything from turpentine to try and thin it out, to sanding it to using steel wool) Nothing worked, so I hung my head and Carey rented the orbital sander and we started over.
The second time sanding only took a few hours because all of the polyurethane was up and we had an idea of what we were already doing.
We recruited our dear friend Jerriann to come and help us stain and we knocked out the stain in the living room and dining room and hallway in 1 day. It was by far a better experience the second time around and the floors look great. Here they are, still a little wet.
Next up... Polyurethane, stay tune!!
