Armed with our new sander and brand spanking new shop vac we were ready to tackle the floors. We followed a tutorial from This Old House for the refinishing the floors.
Step 1: Pulling out the carpet
The first step was to pull out the carpet and remove all the furniture from the room [which meant we needed to lug the piano into a different room].
[No more carpet or furniture]
Step 2: Room Prep
Next we sealed off the rooms that weren’t getting sanded with large plastic sheets covering the doors so that we wouldn’t have to clean up afterwards.
Of course, because we had just bought the house and had not moved in yet, we didn't have any furniture. However, if you have furniture, you'll want to take it out of the room.
Step 3: Sanding
The fun part! Crank up the sander [Of course, make sure you have the right sander and pads first].
As we said in the last post we had to connect the sander to a shop vac to the sander because the sander’s bags had been recalled [fun stuff]. So we taped the shop vac hose to the sander to replace the bags.
First, switch on the shop vac and then start the sander. As you are sanding make sure you don’t stay in one place too long or
Every 5 minutes you will need to stop and vacuum off the buffer pads. This helps them keep doing their job well. However, if you’re doing a large area [as we were] you’ll want to flip them after some time and have multiple sets of pads. Otherwise, they will wear out and won’t be taking up any of the Poly.
After a couple hours of hard work, your floors will be ready to clean up for the next step: applying the poly.
Step 4: Clean Up
According to the This Old House tutorial, all you have to do to do before applying the poly was vacuum, sweep and sweep again. No wet mopping at all.
So, step 4 is: Vacuum the floor. Sweep the floor with a broom and the finish by sweeping with a microfiber cloth.
After cleaning up the floor we were ready to poly! We bought water based polyurethane and went to work....
Step 5: Applying the polyurethane
At first we tried using a roller, but we kept getting bubbles in the finish, so we switched to some expensive brushes. This made things go a lot slower, but certainly the finish would turn out better.
Once we were finished putting down the poly we turned around and looked at our work... smiled, drove back to the rental and crashed. [I think we started working 6:00am and finished around 11:00pm... so you can imagine we were exhausted!]
[New Shiny Floors!!]
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