Fix-it Friday: Our Floor Decision

The pictures didn't come out as nice as I would have liked, but they are okay. After getting some bids on refinishing our floors, we discovered that both time and cost are a little bit beyond us right now.

So, while reading our This Old House magazine from a month or two ago, I ran across an advertisement for a floor refiner. It adds a coat of urethane to floors that are not in poor condition. We don't feel that our floors are in poor condition, so we decided to try this. If it doesn't work, we can still get our floors refinished at some point, but we think this will work for awhile anyway.

Here's the first picture - before I did anything to the floor.

Here's the same patch of floor after I swept it - can't believe how filthy these floors are!

Then I used a hardwood floor cleaner to get the floor ready for the refiner.

Here's after the refiner. It was still wet, so I got a little glare from the flash, but it was easy to see how much better the floor looked. I really think this is going to work for us. The floor patch looks 100% better and has a new coat of urethane to protect it from the wear and tear we plan to afflict on it.

I spent a couple of hours at the house today sweeping and mopping the floors. Based on the sheer amount of dirt I found (and a few paint drops that I missed scraping up), I think I'll be going back tomorrow to mop again. Then, Ed plans to go over on Sunday (maybe Monday) to do the Refiner.

Can't wait to see how great the floors look when they are all done. And, we only need to give them about 24 hours to dry instead of the 4-7 days if we had them completely refinished. That means we should be able to get moved in a little sooner and hopefully settled a little quicker. Yay!