Refinishing Hardwood Floors

Have you ever considered refinishing hardwood floors? Removing the old carpeting to reveal your hardwood floors is exciting and scary at the same time.

You can imagine how great the hard wood floors will look, but you never know the condition of the floor until you remove what's on top.

If your existing flooring is in really bad condition, what do you have to lose by removing it.

If you find the condition of the hard wood is too bad to restore, you can always paint the floors and be creative with stenciling. Your other option is new flooring of your choice.

Removing Carpet

Removing carpet and carpet padding is the easy part. If the person that laid the carpet got staple happy, that can be a big pain in your butt when trying to remove all the staples.

Removing the staples and carpet tack strips is a long process. You can try different methods, we found using a tack puller for removing the staples was the easiest.

For the carpet tack strips along the wall, use the tack removal tool as a pry bar to loosen the strips from the floor, than a regular claw hammer to finish the removal.

Be careful, the tack strips are very sharp. I recommend wearing work gloves and safety glasses for this job.

What you do next depends on the look you want to achieve. Do you want a brand new look or do you want to preserve some of the character that the hard wood acquired over the years?

For the perfect refinished wood floor it may be necessary to use colored wood filler after removing the staples.

Here's an option.........

Sanding hardwood floors is a long dusty process. It's not a process you want to do too many times because sanding breaks down the fibers in the wood

We sanded hardwood floors in one of our first houses. Sanders can be rented from tool rental companies. You will need a large belt sander and a small edger sander.

It's a very dusty mess. Make sure to mask off all doorways and air vents with plastic. Follow instructions on how to use the sander so you do not end up with waves and dips in the floor.

The edges close to the wall may have to be sanded by hand because the edger sander probably won't get close enough to the wall.

The next step would be staining the hard wood or leaving them natural. Apply several coats of polyurethane to protect the wood. Follow the manufactures instruction.

An easier option..........

If the over all condition of the floors are good and you want to stain them a new color or apply new polyurethane, you may consider using liquid sander.

The liquid compound is actually a chemical mixture that eats into the existing polyurethane and creates a surface that feels slightly rough. This surface is the perfect base for stain and polyurethane to adhere to the hard wood.

The liquid sander application process takes a short time. The advantages is savings in time and mess.

The easiest option..........

We were lucky with the house we have now. It was a lot of work removing the carpet but the hard wood floors were in good condition. We decided the holes from the staples were too small to notice.

We also wanted to keep the character the floors acquired over the years. We used a product called Quick Shine Floor Finish by Holloway House that we purchased from Walmart.

This product is also good to use on other flooring such as tile and linoleum. We used Quick Shine for the original tile in our foyer. It brought out the colors in the tile and gave it a lot of shine. The tile looks 100% better.

It's easy to apply, just mop it on a clean dry floor. It was amazing seeing the before and after.

The Quick Shine gave the floors a rich glow and shine, it was a big improvement. It dries fast and additional coats can be applied if you want a high gloss. I re-apply the Quick Shine several times a year.

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