After we had most of the painting done in all the rooms, the next thing was doing the hardwood floors, which let me tell you was much more than I had anticipated! All of the rooms in the house had carpet down over beautiful 80 year old hardwood, minus the kitchen of course. So one would think this would not be too bad, just rip up the carpet and then get to work sanding. Well this was the case for only 4 of the rooms, the rest had challenges that would go far beyond what I had realized, I am going ot go step by step though each room and explain what we had to tackle and how we finally got the floors returned to their glory.
So by far the most difficult room was the dining room, just sitting below the lush blue carpet were the following layers of flooring, blue carpet, laminate, 3/16 plywood, more laminate and the finally old clay tile that was stuck directly to the hardwood using tar based adhesive. Well ripping up the laminate and plywood wasn't really the challenge, the final layer was where our stress was going to start mounting.
So we used scrappers to remove all of the clay tile, now we were just left with the remnants of the tar adhesive. Well words cant not describe the level of frustration that we endured trying to remove this crap. It was old and hard and could not be scrapped off, the giant drum sander we rented didn't even touch it, and both handheld orbital and belt sanders took about 30 minutes for a 2 inch by 2 inch area. So we were quickly running out of ideas and time. I was about ready to just lay new unfinished hardwood over this room and move on when Jared thought he would ask his grandfather if he had any ideas. The next morning Jared arrived with this giant beast of a tool, it was a handheld 6in right angle grinder. Low and behold this beast managed to take off the adhesive much more quickly but still had to go inch by inch. So after countless hours of sanding in the dinning room it was ready to be stained.
The next room was the living room, which we really lucked out on as once we pulled up the carpet there was nothing else besides the pad underneath. So this room was a simple go over with the drum sander twice and sand the outer rim by hand, took about a hour and a half with 3
people working.
Stairs going up the second level were next, the main run of 13 stairs were just covered by carpet which was again great, but once we got to the landing we encountered more of the clay tile that was stuck using tar based adhesive. We really lucked out here though as the tar was not quite as dried out as it was in the dining room, Here we were able to use a heat gun and paint scraped to scrap the tar right off in pretty large chunks. The time consuming part here was since they were stairs all the sanding had to be done hand. My brother and cousins husband were to 2 main people handling the stairs and I love them for taking care of them!
The short upstairs hallway was carpeted and under the carpet was again the clay tile, but we got lucky again and it was still moist and we were able to use a heat gun and scrap it up.
Now all that is left is the 3 bedrooms upstairs, we took up the carpet and found very nice condition floors. After talking we decided that we would just lightly sand the existing finish off and then re-poly them and leave them the natural color instead of staining them.
Well now that the hard part of the project is over all that is left is to stain and polyurethane them, which by contrast was much easier lol. I decided to go with Minwax products. As far as the stain goes a little bit goes along way. We ended up using almost 2 quarts of stain, but that could greatly change if you double the cost of stain, we decided to do only one as we went with a darker stain and like the look after one. Just remember as with staining other things you need to make sure you wipe up the excess stain after it sits a few minutes, otherwise you get differences in color deepness.Once the stain has fully dried, we waited 24 hours since we were not under a huge time crunch, the last step is to lay down the polyurethane.We used Minwax Super Fast Drying Polyurethane for Floors, I read quite a few reviews for this and was pretty happy with what people were saying about it ability to last quite a few years. So we started laying down the poly with a micro foam roller, the nice thing about the poly we used was it did not require a sanding between coats and bubbles in the application smoothed out on their own, and you could apply the second coat 4 hours after the first. So with both coats down we ended up using 8 gallons of poly.
The big piece of advise I offer here with the poly is there are several finishes available like with paints. satin, semi gloss and gloss. We went with semi gloss, but wish we would of went with gloss. We were thinking we didn't want them to be super shiny but still wanted a shine to them. Well because we wanted a bit of shine I thought laying it on thicker would give us this because laying it down normally was not giving much of a shine at all, well as that worked it also took the floors 6 weeks to completely dry versus the 72 hours stated on the can lol When looking at the pictures the shine did come down quite a bit still as the pictures were taken pretty much right after it was laid down.
The entire project cost us about $1300 which included the rental of the sander and buffer, we used over 800 orbital sanding pads and a ton of other items in the quest to restore these floors to their original glory.
The project was a really fun one once it was done and the look of the floors was great, everyone that comes over loves them and asks us if we did them or had someone do them for us and we get to explain the story of doing them. We want to thank Ian, Jared, Chris, and Jeff who helped us do the floors. We could not have done it without the help of my brother Ian and our friend Jared, who helped us every day of the project, enduring the fumes, dust and lack of sleep. We are truly lucky to have such great friends and me such a great brother who gave up so much time and sleep to help us!
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