Reno Redo

You know how they say, "third time's the charm?" We're really hoping for that to come true on the second try. Unfortunately our two weeks of moving out were mostly in vain. The living room floor didn't take, so we had to start over. The good news, our silver lining if you will, is that the hall worked out okay so we don't have to move out again. We'll just have to be pretty strategic in our next staining. Here's a pic of the living room floor with two coats of stain, one coat of poly, several days after it should've dried:

As you can see it's just way too shiny. The poly never fully dried--rather than being tacky to the touch, it was actually oily. We determined the cause of the mess to be two key things: one, the temperature dropped and we hadn't yet turned on any heat, and two, regardless of the apparatus used to apply stain, you still need to work it in with a rag. To correct these issues we now have heat running so our next coats should dry quicker (and without millions of fuzzies blowing through the ducts since we've given them time to clear out), and if we use the staining mop pads for this try, we'll go slowly and wipe each swipe with a rag to work in and remove excess stain.

So where are we now? We spent the weekend starting over. Thankfully we have a friend who owns a sander so we didn't have to shell out $50 or so to rent one. And we were able to take our time and do it in two days. Andrew sanded the living room and the master bedroom (from a previous mess-up accounted here) with a coarse grit (I think 36) the first day, then he sanded with 60 followed by 100 on the second day. Below are some pictures of the process:

Andrew started by scraping some of the excess stain off the floor, leaving this interesting design. 

Once we determined using a 36-grit was the way to go, Andrew stopped scraping and started sanding.

The borrowed sander

The finished product

You may can see a dark edge in the picture above. We plan to rent an edger this weekend rather than spend extra time sanding the edges with a palm sander. Once that is sanded, we'll probably divide the living room in two or three areas to begin staining. We host a Bible study at our house each week, so we want to be able to work and maintain some normalcy (our definition has obviously flexed somewhat with this project!) at the same time. 

All in all, counting the hallway as a room, we did 3 out of 5 rooms correctly the first time. Not too shabby for first-time floor refinishers. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure if the next home we buy needs new floors, we'll install hardwood over refinishing!