Saturday morning, at 6:15, I swung over to Jack's with Becky. We loaded up into his pickup and headed to home depot to pick up the sander. The sander rental is 28$ for four hours, or 40$ for 24 hours. Needless to say, we went with the 24 hour option. We also purchased all the necessary sandpaper for the rental sander (the most expensive part of the project, 6$ a sheet and we got 30 sheets). I had already purchased a whole boatload of other necessary items, including brushes, mineral spirits, rags, hand sandpaper, more mineral spirits, and a few other items.
Then, we got right to it (right after a minor scare with someone falling through the hole where the central air return grille had been removed to allow sanding access to the floor around its rim). Matt handled the big rented sander and Jack and I started doing some detail sanding of the edges and corners with palm sanders. The big rental sander started up with 36 grit sandpaper attached, which looked almost like small gravel attached to paper. It really took the old finish off the floors pretty quickly!
I wanted the floor to keep a lot of its character, though. I wanted it to look beautiful, but *OLD* and beautiful, which is kind of the general theme I am shooting for with the whole decor. This meant that I didn't want to sand too much of the "character" off of the floor, I really just wanted to get it protected and sort of uniformly covered with finish.
The floor underneath what had been the bathroom wall was interesting. As it had obviously not been sanded during the last floor refinishing, it was sort of a ridge that needed some serious hand sanding to flatten. Here it is after a good bit of effort (you can hardly tell!). You can also see the dust that covered everything during the sanding process.
Here is a shot of the living room during a change of sandpaper:
And a shot from the living room to the bathroom (that's my repair job in the hallway, again looking pretty good for an amateur, I think!).
After the sanding was done, we had to inspect the floor for sander marks and blemishes. We did a pretty careful inspection and deemed that the floor would be ready for Sunday's cleaning and finishing effort. Then, we drank beer.
Sunday started a little slowly due to the beer drinking previously mentioned, however the workload left was much smaller and we had more help as Becky and Sylvia (Matt's girlfriend and an expert at applying finish) were able to join us. After some final detail sanding, we vacuumed the floor as clean as possible and began a wipe down of the entire surface with mineral spirits, always pulling any dirt or grit towards the door we would eventually be exiting from. No shoes were worn in the house from this point on! Here is a pic of what the floor looked like after we had wiped it down:
Once the floor was clean, it was time to apply the poly. This was pretty simple: apply a thin coat, using brush strokes with the grain. We joined together as a team and were able to accomplish this pretty quickly, and we finished the first coat at about 11 AM on Sunday. Thank goodness, too, because this gave the finish (a semi-gloss polyurethane) time to dry before the cold snap hit later that night! The last picture in this post is a pic of the "team" finishing up the first coat in the living room, and I was struck by its similarity to an impressionist painting by Gustave Caillebotte called The Floor Scrapers, which I stumbled across in my Internet research for tips on refinishing old hardwood floors:
Have a merry, merry Christmas!
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