Making It to the Refinish

After reading up on how easy it is to refinish hardwood floors it was time to put it into practice.  So Tuesday morning we went to our local Home Depot Tool Rental Center and picked up a drum sander.  After a few unwieldy practice passes Adam got a feel for it and managed to rough sand, patch and  fine sand the floor in a couple of hours.  It was my job to sand down the edges, that Adam couldn't reach with the drum.  It was during this that we discovered our hand sander was not up for the job and it was time for an upgrade.  So, yay, another trip to Home Depot. 

With all the sanding done in pretty much one day.  I had plenty of time to lay down a base coat on Wednesday morning.  Adam picked up a buffer on his way home from work.

Despite what we had read about the difficulty of drum sanding and the relative ease of using a buffer, Adam found the buffer onerous in comparison with the drum sander.  But it wasn't the buffer that kept us from sleeping in our house Wednesday night, nope that was the acetone based lacquer that I laid as our base coat.  Millie and I shacked up at the Baymont Inn while Adam strapped on the respirator and buffed and buffed.  He joined us later for dinner and a night's sleep in a fume-free space.

The following day I dropped Millie at daycare after taking FULL advantage of the complimentary breakfast and headed back to the house to lay another layer of lacquer. 

Thanks to a full day of  open windows and a good breeze we were able to spend the night in our own home Thursday night.  Friday I bought a gallon of water-based polyurethane and laid down two more coats.  I also got a five gallon tub of blue-gray from the mistint pile at Kelly-Moore for $20.  With the floors done, Adam and I started on building the pony wall for the kitchen island and painting the living/dining room.  No more bland beigey-white, time to class it up with two-tone blue-gray and a painted "chair rail".

The final product is just SO pretty!


Tomorrow we take on the wiring and plumbing, eek!