The long awaited hardwood floors post!

AHH.. Finally! The hardwood floors post! I started refinishing the floors mother's day weekend because I was on-call. Let me tell you, It's. SO. Easy!! It cost me about $150 total to do it with the sander, stain, polyurethane and other supplies. It's easy AND cheap, WIN! We considered just polyurethaning the floors and not adding a stain, however, most of our wood is a light oak and it has a "blonde" look if we only polyurethaned them… a richer, deeper stain it is. My only regret during this process is living in the house while doing this. This, however, was not something we could avoid. I didn't matter how many times I cleaned the floors before staining or polyurethaning, I ALWAYS had at least one red hair on my floors and a few or Nym's… that was annoying, but we made due and we absolutely LOVE them!

Here's a picture from before. You can see the traffic patterns in the floor.

This is my sweet sander from Menards. It was $23 for the first 4 hours and then $2/hr after that!
We paid $35 for 8 hours of sanding!

I sanded the floors with coarse, medium, and fine paper. After sanding off the initial polyurethane,  I had no idea where I had sanded, so thank you youtube for this idea! I penciled the floor, the sander acted as an eraser so as I went over an are, the pencil marks were removed and it allowed me to be efficient as I didn't waste time re-sanding parts of the floor.

It felt like move-in day! We sanded the living room first, then moved all our furniture from the bedrooms to the living room and sanded them. We then stained/finished the bedrooms first and moved our furniture back.

Bedroom with one coat of stain

The difference between one coat and two coats. So. Much. Richer!

Finished bedroom with trim. I hope to eventually paint the windows, but that won't happen until I'm done with school.

Nym's room

Ta da! It took me about 10 days to complete this project. Had I not been working/in school, I could have finished it in about 3 days. We're taking a little hiatus from the remodel as we enjoy our summer, barbecues and our finished basement, but hopefully in the next few weeks we'll start on the kitchen demo. I can't wait to make you jealous of my sweet 1960s oven and tile counters. Til then!!

Staying close to home

Do you ever get caught up cleaning or studying and realize your forgot something? Lets just say this happens to me… often. Nym will ring her bells to let us know she'd like to go outside and sure enough I'll let her out. Sometimes she wants to play, sometimes she needs to potty, sometimes she just wants to enjoy fresh air. So… I'll let her out. I'll get caught up studying or cleaning and sure enough Greg will ask me where the puppy is and so we'll go to "find" her. This is what she's doing. :) She is such a good little puppy!! We don't have a fence, she doesn't wear a collar consistently, and we don't have a large backyard. She just stays close to home, keeping an eye out for squirrels :)