Our Kauai Fixer Upper: Refinishing the floors

This is our third (and final!) experience at refinishing hardwood floors. The previous two were the guest room and master bedroom projects. This last project encompasses the living room, dining room, and hallway. Once finished, all the hardwood floors in the house will have been refinished.

The condition my condition was in

The condition of the floors before we started. To be fair, the floor in front of the slider used to be under the fireplace that was removed and we knew about it. Anyway here are some “before” pictures of the patient – er – floor.

The floors had obviously been refinished before. And by refinished I mean that they looked as though they were on the losing end of a West Side Story knife fight. After a couple of passes with a drum sander you can see how badly the previous job had been done.

It took us three days of sanding to even the floor out (mostly). Two full days with the drum sander and another day sanding with a finer grit hand sander. We were able to get out most of the bad ripples and minimize the stains that we found throughout the living room.

Here are a few photos of the floor during and after the sanding.

Quite a difference! We were able to get most of the ruts out of the floor. I don’t even know how many passes with the drum sander it took because I lost count after a while. This was not an easy project because of all the remediation needed.

On the fourth day we started the varnishing. As with the other rooms we are using a crystal clear polyurethane to finish the floors. We will apply six coats. Here are what they look like after the first couple of coats.

The clear varnish brings out the natural grain of the wood and we really like the look as opposed to the dark stain that was on it previously.

As it turned out we decided to apply seven coats of varnish instead of only six. After doing the fine sanding (by hand!) following the fifth coat, we wanted to make sure the floor was the best it could be. Here are some pix after the final sanding/coats.

We think it looks awesome but now it’s time for…

Installing the moulding.

As you could tell in the previous pics, we had removed the old, crappy moulding so we could refinish the floors. Even if we hadn’t refinished the floors, the moulding had to go. For one thing it was made of MDF, which just doesn’t fare well here in the islands. For another thing, it was butt ugly.

As with the other rooms, we used a simple three and a half inch wood casing that is about five eighths of an inch thick. At the bottom we used wood quarter-round to finish it off. We were originally going to paint the quarter-round white to match the moulding, but we liked the way the quarter-round wood looked against the floor so much that we decided to just varnish it and install it with it’s natural wood finish.

Here is the result. The first couple are without the quarter-round installed. The rest are the finished product.

Final Thoughts

Now that the floor is done, we are really happy with the results. And we should be good to go with these floors for years to come. It was a lot of hard work but now it is done and we have another project behind us. The house renovation has taken another big step.

Next Up

The next post will deal with an outdoor project. Here is a sneak peek.

I want to thank all of you for reading this post. I hope it was interesting and that you will read the next one as well.

Aloha!