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!!