Jolt Country

One of the reasons I ditched teh Facebook is so I have more time to put into stripping and refinishing the floors in the home sweet home. Thinking about posting photos but if everyone was to do a google photo search for finishing hardwood floors you'd come up with 10X the photo quality I could do and it would (wood!) look better than the results I am getting.

One of the things I have discovered over the years about home ownership and hope repair projects is that you spend more time fixing previous owners fuck-ups than you do fixing normal aging and weathering.

The last owner stripped the living room floor and parts of the upstairs floors with one of those big industrial belt sanders you rent by the day. Problem is that the previous owner didn't 'sand with the grain' creating a lot of deep scratches and grooves. Also brought the entire level of the floors down about 1/16 of an inch except around the edges of the room where the thing couldn't fit.
Oh yeah, and he used cheap polyurethane as a top coat.

My goal is to strip off all the gunk till I get down to solid oak,
Re-nail the loose boards. (when you strip of 1/16 of the floor thickness you tend to sand right through nail heads sometimes)
Sand everything smooth (getting the scratches and low spots out is the hardest part.

Stain everything a nice golden oak or slightly darker

Apply three to five coats of tung oil. More in traffic areas.

Right now I'm about halfway through stripping the floor. I'm going to finish that half, then move everything and do the rest. I'm only putting in two hours a day so I can't have the room totally empty while I do this.

There is another thing to remember. With today's engineered flooring - sometimes it's simulated wood or uses a composite like a sawdust compressed into something like OSB, then stained to look like solid wood - you can only sand it a certain number of times before you're supposed to replace the boards. With the older hardwoods, as long as you made the floor even you could sand it until you ground it out and nothing was left, over six or eight sandings, if done evenly you could get away with taking off a half an inch to an inch or more.

Today, I think you can only sand these floors 3 or 4 times. And probably less if you don't know what you're doing, like the previous homeowner.

I agree with you on the home ownership thing. Our last house was 10 years old when we bought it and we spent the next 10 years fixing all the things the previous owner "fixed".

My buddy Jeff converted his living room to wood flooring, using that fake wood stuff you mentioned. He packed the boards in too tight and in the summer when the wood expands he would end up with pockets in the floor where the wood would bubble up. Fun for the kids to bounce on, not so much when mom trips over them.

This is the first house we've had wood flooring in. I don't know if you and Robb remember but our formal front room and dining room has wood flooring in it. It's the fake stuff too, and it's slicker than snot. Any furniture not on a carpet slips and slides all over the place out there. All you have to do is plop down on a couch and it goes sliding. I really need to get a couple of larger carpets out there.

Good luck on your project man. I know it's a lot of hard work but I'm sure will look great when you're all done!

OK , I took pictures. This is the floor as it is now. 100 years old. Imagine how many people have danced to Glenn Miller on it.




This is a close up of the scratches and gouges from the previous owner. I messed with the contrast to bring out the detail.


This is a larger shot of the same area. You can see how faded and dull the wood really is.



This is a side-by-side of stripped/ sanded and stained and oiled.

In the bottom left corner of the last photo you can see where some heavy furniture had been dragged and re-dragged across that part of the floor. Staining it really brought out the grooves in the wood. I would like to think that it was a radio the size of a coffin (and twice as heavy) that made those marks.

Also, the lines of nails heads are not very even as you go across the floor. Perhaps it was a tipsy immigrant from eastern Europe that pounded them in!

Halfway done! Moving all the furniture to the other side now!

Three quarters done. The hardest part is keeping the animals off the Zip-Strip. Then keeping them off the fresh stain. Then keeping them off the fresh tung oil. Know what? I need a baby gate...

Cats hate not having access. That's why if you open a door they will stand half in and half out. They don't really want to go through the door, they just want access. So if you close off a door they get all put out.


THE
PIS..SY...COANALIST
AARDVARK

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More tung oil...




they all look like bowling alley photos or something



When I get the room and furniture back in place I'll take a couple of 'after' photos. I didn't think about shooting any before shots but you all get the idea.




THE
GOT WOOD
AARDVARK

That's an excellent texture. I may not know what I am talking about.