Refinishing the Hardwood Floors

The biggest project we accomplished before moving into our new home was refinishing the hardwood floors throughout the house. Despite the condition of the floors, this feature was one that I loved the most about the house. I love the look and feel of wood floors!

These were in pretty bad shape though. Apparently the previous owner had let the dogs/cats have free reign of the house while he was away – for weeks at a time. GROSS. And SAD! So there were lots of stains on the floors.

Joe had helped his dad to refinish wood floors a couple of years before we did ours so he had some experience. While I was away on a work trip Joe and Tim rented a belt sander from the hardware store and went to town sanding the floors down.  

• With the belt sander you go in the direction of the wood grain, and it’s important to leave some room near the edges so you don’t rough up the baseboards too much.
• Around the perimeter of the room we used a circular sander to carefully sand the edges of the floors to match the rest.
• Once you have the flooring sanded down you’ll need to spend some time getting up all of the dust and wiping them down.
• We used the shop-vac to get up the dust and then followed up with a damp mop several times to get all of the dust up.
• You’ll also want to wipe down all of the walls and trim to clean up any dust from sanding.
• Next you’ll choose the stain. We opted for a darker color. An added bonus to the dark color is that it does a good job of hiding imperfections in the wood. We used MinWax.
• To apply the stain we used rags and wiped it in even coats in the direction of the wood grain.
• Our job took 2 coats of stain.
• Once the stain was dried we went back to areas that looked like they needed more and applied it there.
• We let the stain sit for 24-48 hours and then applied the polyurethane coating to the top. To apply the poly use a sponge mop and work yourself out of the room – also going in the direction of the wood grain.
• We let the floors sit up for 2 days prior to moving anything into the house, and even then we walked around in socks for a week.
• The smell of the poly lasted FOREVER. I felt like all of our clothing reeked of it for weeks! J So lesson learned, bag up your clothing and belongings prior to do this type of project!

Before Pictures:

Here is the flooring before we sanded it.

Here is the staircase before

Here is the staircase after stain and before painting the wood.

Here is the staircase complete with trim and transitions painted white!

Finished flooring in our sitting area. Furniture circa 2007. :)

Living room with finished floors - and our lovely hand me down furniture. 

Curb Appeal for Vernie

Take a good look at this front stoop. It’s falling off.

In order to make our front entrance safer and more appealing the entire front walk and stoop were replaced. Joe and I were so happy with how this turned out and I think our neighbors were even more excited! They’d been looking at this eyesore – along with overgrown grass for too long! We’re fortunate to have family in the concrete business. :)



The walk/stoop right after it was poured – you can also see the new fascia board for the gutters that would be installed soon after.

 
Here are some photos of the new walk from the summer of 2008 – after Joe pulled away all of the railroad ties and we replaced with some nice plantings!
 

Paint!!

The walls in this house STUNK. And they were ALL WHITE


To give the house a fresh look and make our paint job stick Joe recommended that we sand all of the walls and then prime and paint. My husband is a meticulous painter. When you paint with Joe there are no shortcuts allowed. Joe did most of the sanding and I helped with the parts I could reach. I underestimated the value of sanding the walls. Once we sanded we were able to fix the imperfections – hammering nails back in, patching holes, etc. It makes a world of difference to start with a clean and even slate!


Once the walls were sanded everything was wiped down to get rid of the dust. Make sure to get some big soft sponges and dampen them to wipe everything down. You'll want to do it more than once.


Ceilings and closets – my wonderful father in law, Tim, sprayed all of the ceilings and closets for us!


Next it was time for the primer. KILLZ was our best friend – despite how toxic it is, it sealed up the walls and helped to get rid of the stench in the house. We were lucky it was Fall - we could leave the windows open!


After primer we taped the trim and got the rollers ready for COLOR! I had lots of fun picking out paint for our house. We purchased all of the paint from Sherwin Williams in Mission and were very happy with the quality.


Things I learned from Joe about painting:
- Cut in the corners and edges with a wide brush first.
- Roll from the top down in even lines, getting as close as you can to the ceiling w/o touching it.
- Watch for drips! (He hates drips!)


Here’s where I’ll leave you with before and after shots of the color transformations in each room – except for the master bedroom – that’s a different post where we’ll learn all about painting with RED.


Living Room/Hallway with seller’s items – and a preview of the grungy hardwoods:

Living Room & Hallways with Sherwin Williams – Macadamia:

Bedroom #1 with the seller's stuff:

 

Bedroom 1 with Sherwin Williams - Friendly Yellow:

(That's my little brother, William, painting the storage nook for me!)

Bedroom #2 Before – with seller’s stuff.

Bedroom 2 with Sherwin Williams – Lily Pad (discontinued I think…)

The Game Plan

We celebrated closing day with pizza and beer in camp chairs in the empty living room! Our family and friends joined and agreed we bribed them with beer to help us get started on our projects that weekend.

It was Sept 30th – we had until Halloween to be out of the rental house and move our stuff in. We put together a list of things we had to do before we could live in our new house. Here’s what it included:

•           Refinish Hardwood floors
•           Killz Primer and Paint all walls
•           Paint ceilings
•           Sand and Paint Kitchen Cabinets
•           Tear out drop ceiling in basement (Eeew!)
•           Tear off what was left of gutters and hang new fascia board around house
•           Get gutters put on house
•           Tear out existing HVAC and prep for new to be installed.

And during all of this we’d also be planning for our January wedding and attending a family wedding in CA – and don’t forget Thanksgiving and Christmas! 

Here are me and my dad ready to work! Joe got me my very own tool belt to celebrate! 

Closing Day 2006

Back to the beginning...

Joe and I closed on our first house Sept 30th 2006. The entire purchase process was a whirl-wind! We first looked at our house driving around the neighborhoods that we new we liked and then enlisted the help of our good friend and realtor, Linetta.

When we first looked at Vernie it was interesting to say the least – it smelled, was in need of some major work, and had some interesting and dated décor. From the beginning we could picture ourselves living in this home. Our dad’s fell in love with the project it would be, and our mom’s thought we were out of our league. To keep our options open we looked at a few homes in our modest price range, but were always disappointed with the size of home we could afford and the locations.

Our minds kept going back to Vernie and we decided to put an offer on it. A lowball offer. After a counter-offer and an acceptance – along with negotiations to have the basement wall fixed as part of the purchase we were going to be home owners. The inspection revealed things that we knew would be issues and projects. Attic full of junk with animal droppings (thanks to the hole in the roof that went unattended for a while), we'd need a new HVAC, leaky faucets, unsafe front entrance, no gutters on most of the house, a drainage project…the list went on. And the basement - that's another post on it's own.

Here is the picture of Vernie when we first went to look at it.

Being the young and fun people we were – we were still excited and looked forward to closing day!

Here we are on closing day after the wall had been fixed – we were ready to roll!

I have a blog...

So I've decided to start a blog. I am not a writer. My posts will be short and rely quite a bit on photos. This blog is intended to document the transformation of our first home and our journey in purchasing a new one. We've started the process of considering moving to a new house and have a laundry list of projects to complete prior to listing our house. You'll hear about each and every one here on this blog!!

I think I'll start at the beginning and post the transformation of Vernie (that's what we'll call this house) room by room!

Stay tuned for a post about closing day back in 2006.