Hitting the Floor

We first walked through what is now our house early one sunny afternoon in November 2005. Tara stopped in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen, and making sure that the real estate agent's eyes were cast elsewhere, turned to me and mouthed the words "I love it".

I looked down at the dining room floor beneath my feet, sighed, and said, "Well, first thing we have to do is refinish these floors."

There was nice hardwood under there somewhere, beneath the stains, scratches, wear, tear, and indelibly burned image of a rug that had probably not been moved in the 45 years since the house had last been on the market.

As a picture is worth a kilobyte of text, here is some insight into what I was feeling that bright November day:


My "first thing" prediction turned out to be about 17 months shy of the truth, and only this midsummer did we complete the cascade of major and minor projects we needed to do before we could turn our attention back down to the dining room hardwood. Tara, ever the adventurous spirit, was immediately up for doing it ourselves. I, ever the spirit prone to end up in the emergency room after running myself over with a drum sander, decided to see how much it would cost to have a pro do it.

All I needed was someone to sand, stain, and finish 195 square feet of wood that we've been told with varying degrees of authority is either fir, southern yellow pine, or red oak. A few hundred bucks, right? Ha ha ha--nope. $1100, came the low estimate, so Tara and I won the contract.

Yeah, not knowing what you're doing is always scary. But whenever that's the case, the first and best move to make is not to be too precious about your expected results. It's easier to change your standards than your qualifications, anyway. Our design philosophy, then, became not to try to make those 125 year-old floors look like 125 day-old floors. A little bit of a distressed look would fit better with the projected turn-of-the-century design of the room. Mentally, we were ready.

So, the day of reckoning reckoned, and we moseyed on down to Carr Hardware and rented what us non-pros call a U-Sand machine. It's a four-pad random orbital sander, guaranteed impossible to destroy your floors with. That's it in the picture up there. Several advantages to the design, including an efficient vacuum and bag to minimize dust, and a sanding surface that extends right to the edge of the unit. You can't gouge or put swirly marks into the wood, you don't need a separate edger, and you aren't coughing up fine wood particles for the next full month.

Appearances do not tell the full story of how much this beast physically WEIGHS. I nearly herniated three or four disks, two ligaments, and a carpal tunnel or two just getting the damn thing into and out of the car.

So once we plugged the thing in and started sanding with both hands, we realized that the design that makes it impossible to wreck your floors also makes the actual sanding process last the best part of a day. The thing is TERRIBLE at removing old finish: the 36-grit sandpaper that comes with it gums up after only a few minutes, and if you don't catch it in time, sets up a lovely tar-like residue on the floor that you need to scrape off with a putty knife and one or more toxic chemicals.

Eventually we finished up with--that is to say, ran out of--both daylight and low-grit sandpaper, and we moved on to the less aggressive grits. Yes, I'm too lazy to think of a good breakfast joke around that line.

Eight or so hours later, the sanding was done, and the next day, after some lovely hands-and-knees-based dust removal, we started the staining process.

Tara chose an oil-based stain that looked like liquid tobacco and smelled like brain damage. We put in on thick because we liked the darker effect of it, and another round of hands-and-kneesing with a rag and a can of mineral spirits gave us the hand-rubbed distressed finish we were after. Fine work, but we were almost overcome by vapors and had to spend the next night in Tara's parents guest room.

Two and a half days later, once the stain had dried and the headaches abated, we went over it with four coats of water-based polyurethane finish. I loved this stuff so much I wanted to dump Tara for it. Almost no odor, easy to apply, dried quickly, and cleaned up easily. Of course, before coats two and three, there was more crawling around with a sanding pad and tack cloth. I hadn't gotten that close to a floor since margarita night my freshman year in college, but finally, voilà, we had finally completed the job:


Yeah, we couldn't get the rug mark completely out since the stain took deeper into that wood, but frankly the whole thing looks a zillion times better than when we started, and the entire project--sander rental, sandpaper, stain, finish, Advil, and various tools--ran us around two hundred dollars. We got what we wanted from our floor, saved $900, and can now bore people silly with our knowledge and experience of floor finishing procedures. All in all, we're fairly proud of ourselves.

And we still have no idea what type of wood this is. Any guesses?