One Room Challenge Week 4: The One Where They Refinished the Floors

Holy freaking cow! I feel like the last four weeks have flown by and we are officially at the halfway mark of the Spring 2020 One Room Challenge!

Last week I shared all about the floor plan and a sneak peek at the design board. This week is all about the floors! Well, sort of. It turns out I know nothing about refinishing floors and I am equally as bad at documenting the process but here we go.

The old hardwood flooring in the space was screaming for help. It was so worn down that in some areas there were patches down to the raw wood. We were not 100% positive what kind of wood we were dealing with at first but our best guess was that they are old growth pine given the softness, grains and color.

Working with pine wasn’t a huge issue but all of our experience with refinishing hardwood floors, which isn’t much, is with oak hardwoods. Soft wood like pine is very easy to ding and dent so we needed to be careful. We started out with an orbital sander to be a little more gentle and went through about half a dozen sanding pads before we realized it just wasn’t cutting it. Back to the hardware store we went and rented a drum sander. When all was said and done we had made several trips to the hardware store for more sanding pads and even more tools. The sanding process took about 2 full days to get the floors ready for stain.

For the stain we decided to use leftover Minwax Early American stain from our first floor. I took almost no consideration into how the different wood types would take the stain and unfortunately the lesson was learned the hard way with the pine leaning way more dark and red than I would have liked. There was no going back though and I was ready to just be done with the floors so we pressed on. I finished staining the floors over a period of a three days while I contemplated saying “f-it” and painting over them. In the end I decided to keep the flooring as is and let them fully dry for a week before we brushed on the poly to seal them.

It isn’t exactly what I had hoped for but I learned a lot from this project so it’s at least a partial win.

As always, don't forget to follow along each week to see the progress of each of the Featured Designers and Guest Participants!