So obviously, if you didn’t know – we are in the midst of what has morphed into a full blown renovation.  During the whole month we’ve owned this house, we have replaced major systems, redone the bathroom, demo-ed two gross bathrooms, painted and generally prepared the house for us. All during this time there has been a little birdie on both the dude’s and I’s shoulder saying ‘you should just redo the floors’.  And by little bird I mean multiple influential people we know.

So, we got super stupid and decided to dive in on the floors. At first, I was totally against it. I was like ‘no that’s insane we can’t afford it’.  We did end up getting a price quote that rang in at $5,000 NOT including fixing the major work that needed to be done in the bedroom where the bathroom was.  So that was depressing. Then the dude started watching too much This Old House and YouTube videos about it. Pretty much we decided if these yokels could do it, we probably could too.

Me, the dude, and my pops all did a bunch of research about what we should do.  It seemed like polyeurathane was really difficult – had the most chance for a eff up.  We stumbled upon ‘oil treating’ hardwoods and the results are really cool looking – without having to do a complex stain and clear coat. Plus, oil for the floors is no-VOC (aka no harmful toxic chemicals).

 

So once we decided we were going to try to polish our turd floors into some pretty ones – it was game on.   It was REALLY hard to find the oil for the floors. One, in part due to the fact that most stain is oil-based – finding oil vs. oil-based stain is hard and stain can creep into your shopping cart really easily.  I finally found a hardwood company’s website that had a short list of oil manufacturers (mostly European).

I called the hardwood company’s contact and the owner of the business didn’t even know he had that listed on his site…. it also would take him 3 weeks to order/get the oils for us.  I actually called 3 different local flooring stores and none of them sold materials to redo existing floors they all were primarily in the business of new floors.  I found that interesting. Also, didn’t this random owner guy know that we are on a really tight deadline? Oh sorry, my narcissist ‘my house is the center of everyone’s world’ thing flared up again 😉   Anyways, I started looking for how to buy this euro-oil and found a great website www.1877floorguy.com.  It totally sounds like a fake website where I just got $500 of my money stolen from, but it was Google Verified and we just got the supplies so I can attest this site is legit and has great customer service.

I did end up going with WOCA because they had really easy to find/understand/buy items.  I bought the floor prep, the oil, some buffing paste, and the everyday care cleaner.  1877floorguy.com had $30 3-day shipping so it was good!

We did choose to do the grey-oil and then I got some white buffing paste to make it a little ‘lighter.’

Okay now the fun part – the sanding! So I can probably speak for both of us (since the dude got MAJOR cold feed about doing this the day before we sanded) that it’s terrifying to start sanding your floors. The tools are insane, the idea of ruining your floors can be kind of scary, and honestly it was like ‘what the f*ck are we getting ourselves into?’

We rented a Drum Sander, Square Buff Sander, and an edger from the Home Depot. The sanding paper was somewhat pricey $5-$8 per paper and each one of those would do ~100 sqft.  Our project is ~1,000 sqft so we did end up spending $180 in sandpaper for all the tools. The rentals themselves were between $50-$80 per day. So $420 in total.

The dude was brave enough to start the drum sander first.  I managed the cord and helped to make sure nothing was going wrong while we got used to the giant drum sander. Eventually, we didn’t need to manage the cord anymore so I got to do the 2 other bedrooms while the dude figured out how to perfectly sand with the edger.

 

The fearless leader starts in the bedroom

Here’s a time lapse of me in the ‘blue bedroom’

Removing the ‘lay-z-boy’ marks from ma and pa hillbilly

Pic of the difference:

Now we will clean the floors and let them dry – THEN OILING!