.project one: floors

Well, I decided to post about our renovation in parts. As they’re completed. To date, the only thing we’ve started and truly completed is our beautiful hardwood floors. This was something we knew had to be done before we moved into the house. It is such a dirty job!

Our good friend Russell owns a business refinishing hardwood floors and offered to do ours over a weekend for a deal! We are soooooo grateful to him for coming up from Calgary to do this with us!

Here’s the story:

When we bought this home we thought the floors looked alright. Upon further inspection we could plainly see that the guy who owned the home before us had installed them himself… and he had done a pretty lazy job! There were huge gaps along all of the walls (he didn’t even take out the trim before laying the floors!) and big gaps between lots of the boards too. Some of the boards hadn’t even been secured down… Gosh guy!

This hardwood floor extends over the whole living room, hallway, and three bedrooms upstairs.

BEFORE:

We started out by securing down the loose boards and filling in some of the gaps that were much too big around the edges (we were lucky and found an open box of this exact maple hardwood flooring at Home Depot and bought it for, like, nothing).

Then Russ arrived and got right to work on a Friday night. This huge vacuum-looking machine sands off all the old stain. It's awesome, but loud!

The weird thing was the smell of the stain coming off… it was like blueberry pie. Seriously.

**Turn down your volume before playing this video!!**

Next day, Air fixed more of the difficult spots while Russ sanded everything for a second and third time!

Air had the lovely (back-breaking) job of sanding all of the edges where the big sander couldn’t reach with this little guy:

The next step was filling the gaps. Basically just covering the entire floor with wood filler. We chose to go with the natural maple wood color, so we didn’t use any stain at all.

And then there’s more sanding and polishing (and massaging):

The entire house is completely covered in dust at this point. So we had to sweep up and clean EVERYTHING before this final step.

Sealing the floor. Three coats:

………………………………….And I give you…………………………………….

AFTER:

Beautiful floors, indeed. I really love how bright and airy the house is now… Not to mention how awesome it is that there aren’t ANY cracks between the boards.

Thank you again Russell!

…more to come, of course