Mini DIY Floor Revitalizing Project

Hi!!

Sorry for the lack of posting.
I was moving houses and doing some mini fixes so we've been crazy busy.
Finally more or less moved in now.

I learnt a lot about flooring during our mini project.
In general, apparently whatever you think your timeline you need and add 20-50% more time.
We thought we would be able to do everything in a week but it took us an additional half a week.
So what did we do? We decided that the carpet is very old and dirty so we wanted to rip it out and use the original hardwood underneath. Yes, someone covered hardwood floors with carpet! Seems baffling now but the house is about 50 years old and carpet was the thing to do back in the 70s/80s.

Each piece of carpet is held down by a strip of nails poking up and there's foam stapled into the board that's in-between the carpet and the floor.
So really, pulling up the carpet is the easy part.
Removing all those strips of nails and the staples was the painful part of the removal.

After removing the carpets, this is what we had:

It seems like some floors had stains on it, some spots were ok, some spots still had old varnish on it. So it all depended on what happened. We had one room that had broken glass and paint all over the floor. That was the worst to sand and clean up.

I honestly thought now, the hard work is done and it's easy stuff now with the sanding and varnishing but boy was I wrong. 

We used 80 grade and 120 grade paper.

We rented a floor sander to do the floors. It was great on floors with no varnish, but floors with a bit of varnish left gunked up the sand paper so we would either have to spend time cleaning the paper or use new ones.

After the fact, we were told to use courses sand paper first. It'll still gunk but easier to clean. 

But sanding made a huge difference for majority of the room.

Half sanded

Fully sanded 

We rented an edge sander too but had too many issues with the varnish and sand paper. And we found that the circular motion went against the grain of the wood so it messed up the wood even though we ran 120 over it. Perhaps we needed even a finer grain to finish but that was upsetting.

So we ended up scrapping and sanding by hand after doing 1 room unsuccessfully with the edge sander. That took us days cause it was back breaking.

Now that all the floors are nice and sanded, we had to decide if we will stain or just varnish. 

Because some of the dirty stains were not removed during the sanding process, we decided to stain to hide it. We did not imagine staining would take us hours to do.

The small room took 1.5 hours. The family/dining room took me 3 hours to stain. 

There's no short cut when it comes to staining. You have to wipe on and wipe off the excess and then leave for 24 hours to dry.

At least it looks good after. 

The varnish is pretty fast. I just run around with my roller and varnish. 

Several days later, this is the result.

We decided not to stain the stairs and the hallway in the upper floor and learned something else.

Apparently, if you use an oil base varnish, it will tint the wood so you really don't have to stain if you're looking for a pretty normal color floor!!!!

It turns the very white floor you see and tints it with enough yellow so that it's not just the pale color you see after sanding.

If we didn't have dirty stains to hide, we would have just done this and saved us 2 days of staining time. Live and learn :)

Good luck to anyone else doing floors.