Home Remodeling: Refinishing Wooden Floors

One factor the  many things that led us to buy the new house is the wooden floors in most of the  rooms  including all the  bedrooms, the office,  the dining room, and the  living room.  The house hasn't been updated in 15 years (according to the report given to us) so everything in it is  getting wore out including the  floors.  So my husband said that we should refinish the floors before we move in.  We contacted some contractors around the area but  it cost an arm and a leg for them to do it so we've decided to do it ourselves.  

Living Room

Master's Bedroom

 We went to Home Depot and rented   a two-part diamond brush buffer (square buff floor sander) as recommended by the guy working there.  He said that it would  scrape off the  polyurethane.  It did the job but the  problem was it scrape the heck out of the wood so it left  swirls in it.  Now the plan was to rent a drum sander instead of the buffer  but my husband was  worried to use it  as he read so many horror stories using it so when the guy talked him into  using a buffer, he took it.  

Living Room

It took my husband 2 days to do all 7 rooms and closets.  I am glad he took  one week off because  this job could not be done  as an after-work project as it is a hard core  job to do.  

Home Office

There's  dust everywhere right now in the house, so we will have  some Major cleaning to do before we  can move there.  We only have two more weeks to  work on it and that's hard because my husband is  back to work again.

My job is to  vacuum all the dust  as my husband  scraped the poly.  I love doing this kind of job  with him.  I remember when we first bought  our  first house, we remodeled the  basement and I learned how to  do the tiles.  

So farm we have rented three tools already and it already cost us  $1035 already but it is better than paying 5-10 for a contractor to do it.  The second tool that we've rented is the Coating removal tool which  did nothing in removing the  swirl caused by the buffer.  We ended up  renting the drum sander that my husband  did not want to use as it was the only way we could clean up the  swirl caused by the  square buff floor sander.  Even that did not  addressed the whole issue as some of the  wooden floors are not evenly leveled so we will have to manually sand it.  

The hard part  to do is the hallway, the closets, and the  stairs.  So far, I have been using the  orbit sander that  we bought so I can sand the edges that the big machine cannot reach.  Man doing this  job is a lower back killer, I can hardly stand up when I keep doing for a long period of time lol.

Home Office

One of the Bedrooms

Dining Room

This is how it looks like now.  We still have to  rent another tool  to smoothen the wood floors then when we are done, we will be staining next, and then  put the poly in.  

Hubby uses a drum sander and I'm using this orbit sander to do the edges. It's a lower back killer doing this #job lol. #homeImprovement #HomeReno #woodFloors

A photo posted by Chubskulit Rose (@chubskulitrose) on May 6, 2016 at 12:49pm PDT

Another project that we will be  doing  after the wooden floors is tiling the  family room, kitchen, and hallways.  All the linoleum  in these rooms have seen better days already.  The fireplace needs an upgrade too.  We still haven't figured out what we are going to do but we will get there.

Fireplace at the family room

Family Room  leading to the  kitchen

Family room leading to the  living room

Every room in this house is big except the kitchen.  I mean it is a decent size but not as big as my current kitchen in the first house.

I like it though that it has an eat-in extension leading to the  office and to the dining room.

Hallway leading to the kitchen from the main door.

The half bath in the home office.

The bathroom upstairs is fairly big.  You can tell how dated it  is,  it needs an upgrade but that would be a long  project so we will use it for the time being.  I like it though because  it has a double sink.  

This is the  bathroom to the master's bedroom.  It's a little small  but it's okay.  Again the color will tel  you how dated the bathrooms are.  I got to  give it to the former though, although everything is dated, he kept it in a  good condition.

I like  the color blue but I don't think I prefer  it in the bathroom especially if everything is blue.

We will need at least 25-50 more grand to upgrade  things in the house but it would be a long time to do it.  We just want to  refinish the floors before we move in so the dust will be out of the way.  Remodeling a house is  a huge expense and a lot of work but I am glad that my husband  can do most of it as we can't really afford to hire a contractor around here.  We learned that lesson when we have  a porch built at our current house, we spent 22 thousand just for a porch!  When we  ask the company to give us an estimate to do our kitchen, they gave us a 40 thousand estimate so I told my husband to just drop it lol.  That's why we never had the kitchen done in our current home.  Despite the money we put in the house, we will be losing some when we sell this because the kitchen is not upgraded.  Oh well, at least now, we have a home  that can accomodate  the size of our family.