How to refinish your Hardwood Floors Part 1 of 3

Being an interior designer, my home and surroundings highly affect how I feel.  I have a beautiful new home, but as I did not select the finishes; they are not what I would have chosen .   At all.

I have conflicting undertones everywhere and dated finishes, even though the house is just 7 years old.  

What's bothered me the most is my hardwood flooring.  It's orange, VERY orange, red oak solid hardwood.  (And burgundy cabinets, and gold backspash, and black and PINK granite - but that's another story!)

I've decided to bite the bullet and take you on this journey with me.  Pardon the dust!

1.  First step is to hire someone you trust.  I have a brilliant contractor who doesn't specialize in flooring, but he's done great jobs refinishing my client's floors.  I trust him.

2. Determine the amount of time this will take, I budgeted 3 weeks, but I'd suggest longer.

3. Determine where you are going to live, whilst your floors are going to be sanded.  We live in a large home, so we decided to take over the basement.  BUT, the kitchen is among the rooms being sanded, so that will be out of commission for a while.  We moved the toaster, Microwave, blender and paper plates and cups downstairs.  The fridge ended up on the deck, along with the stove and dishwasher.  We've had a very mild winter, so it wasn't a problem to plug in the fridge outside.

ORIGINAL ORANGE OAK FLOORING - TOO ORANGE FOR MY TASTE!

4.  Next we put poly plastic sheets over everything, the cabinets, counters, railings, fireplace, lighting, stairwell, and entrance to the foyer.  

5.  My contractor started with a 100 grit sander, and worked about 6 hours and finished a spot only  10 ft x 4 ft.  It seems every flooring finish is different, and this finish was EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to remove.  To make a long story short, we ended up going with a drum roller with 36 grit paper.  And the dust started to fly!   We also found out the guest bed was very uncomfortable.  Karma I guess.

MOVING THE FRIDGE OUTSIDE DURING WINTER - GLAD IT WAS A VERY WARM WINTER!

EDGES OF FLOORING SANDED WITH A SMALL MACHINE TO GET RIGHT TO THE EDGES.

ROOMS FILLED TO THE BRIM WITH SAWDUST!

 It took him 4 days to remove 600 sq. ft of finishing and get the wood down to bare wood.  We selected the perfect stain colour - not too dark, no red and NO ORANGE undertones. Varathane wood stain in Espresso    We applied it, looked great,  did the second coat the next day, then were told to wait 24 hours, but waited 72 hours and applied the top coat.  Everything looked good, so after 2 days we applied the second top coat and left it to dry overnight.

The next morning the flooring looked good but a little different. That night I noticed white patches appearing on top of certain boards.  We left it another day and yup... it looked worse.  

Horrible white patches on flooring.

I went on every online site, talked to all sorts of professionals that I could find, to research the cause of these random white patches.  It looked like someone had poured milk on the wood and let it dry, leaving a dry powdery white coating on about 25% of the boards.  No one knew what to do so we.......    resanded the whole bloody thing again!  

4 more days of sanding - and dust.  Aggh...


We vacuumed the walls, windows, floors and everything else again - and started all over....
To be continued in Part 2 of 3 refinishing your Red Oak hardwood floor.