NEW FLOORS :: A LABOR OF LOVE

So, we have lived in our home for about 7.5 years and right when we moved in, we just ripped up our carpet and kept the wood floors as they were, just polishing them every once in a while. About a year ago, I painted all of the trim white in our house and thought the next step would be to finish the floors. About a month before we went to Italy, I had my LASIK eye surgery and my husband would be home from work taking care of the kids for those two days-and because he can’t sit idle, he offered his services for a project in our house. I volunteered him to refinish our floors.
Here is a picture of the before:

And the after: (I switched up the furniture too)

There are so many great resources online for tips when refinishing your floors. We probably won’t ever do it again.. that’s usually our sentiment after doing a big DIY project 🙂 That’s why you have a starter home right? It’s our practice home to learn that we should just hire out-ha kidding! It just took longer than we had hoped and we ended up having to sand the whole floor twice because we were told we could just use a buffer-which we found out quickly was not the case-we needed an actual belt sander. And now we can see all of our mess ups-probably only noticeable to us though. We used dark walnut color and then used a water based polyurethane. Which was great because then it didn’t smell bad.

And I really don’t like having my house in disarray-which it was for about two weeks. We did our dining room, living room a hallway and the little front entry. There, I ripped up old tile and linoleum to get to the wood floors underneath. AND, crazy story, while I was ripping up the tile and some of the trim around the front door, I exposed a bee’s nest that had come in through the outside. All the sudden bees started attacking me and I got stung three times in the matter of about a minute. And one of the stings turned in to an infection that I needed to go to Urgent Care for and get antibiotics. But now our floors are done and I love them. Except they do show dust and scratches, so I am always cleaning them it feels like 🙂