How much Advil does it take to dull the pain caused by 2 12-hour days of kneeling and squatting? And why the hell didn’t I buy my own set of knee pads???

Our weekend can be summed up in a few words – pain, exhaustion, and exilhiration. We rented an orbital drum sander Saturday morning, and worked diligently all weekend to get two (of four) hardwood floors sanded, stained, and varnished. Here’s a quick summary of events:

Friday Night:

We removed everything from the two rooms (the bedroom and office) and piled it up in the living room and dining room. We wrapped and taped anything in the house that dust could potentially ruin, like the tv and computers. Then, we did one last round of carpet-tack hunting and went to bed early so we’d be ready for the weekend ahead.

Saturday:

We rented the orbital sander from Home Depot ($70/day, plus sanding pads) and went to town on the office floor, which is roughly 200 sq. ft. The sander was not nearly as hard to work with as we had imagined. In fact, I wish it had been a little more powerful – it took a long time to get everything off! We found that only one of the four sanding pads had much oomph to it, so we lead with that pad and replaced it about 2-3 times more often than the other three.

The main sanding took a few hours, and then we had to go around the edges with a power sander, which took another few hours. We weren’t incredibly anal about getting every last speck of color off them because we like the aged look.

After the entire floor was sanded, and all big gaps/holes filled with wood putty, I vacuumed like crazy (on my hands hands & knees with the Shop-Vac) and then used tackcloth to get every last bit of dust out of the room. When it was dust-free, I threw on a pair of shoe covers and started staining the edges and floor. The edges by hand with a rag, and used a lambswool mop-head-ish attachment to stain the rest. We used two applications of Minwax red mahogany, which gives makes the problem areas less noticeable and matches closely to the old finish.

While I stained the office, Teague was busy sanding in the bedroom. By Saturday night at 11pm we had finished all of our major sanding (hooray – no extra rental fees!) and had 2 coats of stain on the office floor. We taped up the doorway to prevent fumes from escaping (works better than it sounds!) and crashed on a mattress in the middle of our living room floor, where we slept uncomfortably until early the next morning.

Sunday

Ahhh….. nothing like waking up, knees throbbing and bones creaking, and having to start all over again. I thought about having a nervous breakdown to get myself out of more sanding, but decided the pain would be worth it. So, about half of Sunday was spent crawling around sanding the edges of the living room, vacuuming up the dust, and getting it ready to stain.

We threw a coat of poly on the office floor around 2pm, and spent the rest of the day peeking in with wonder and amazement because it looks AWESOME. So very, very good.

By 10pm on Sunday, the living room was fully stained and ready for it’s 8+ hours of drying time.

Teague threw a coat of varnish on it this morning, so now we’ve got to wait it out for 3 days before sanding both (lightly) and adding another coat of varnish to them. Then, 3-4 MORE days before we can put furniture in there. That means another week of camping on the floor. Good times! It’s definitely worth it though, and we’re thrilled to finally tackle this project.

I’ll give a post-project wrap-up when it’s all over, but here’s some photos to tide you over:

Before – lots of paint specks, scuffs, and crud!

During – here you can see the edges have been stained, and I have just laid a new layer of stain on the right-hand side.

After – with one layer of varnish (still wet)