Sanding

We have cypress wood floors in a portion of the house that have looked pretty sad for several years. We've been putting off refinishing them because it's the area where the dogs live and the polyurethane has to sit for several days without traffic to cure properly. We were getting ready to go on vacation last month and I decided to rent a sander and try and get the floors done right before we left so it could cure while the dogs were in the kennel. 

I did ample research online and watched many videos on YouTube on floor refinishing and felt ready to try my hand at it. The rental store guy said the square footage we had to finish would take about 4 hours so we rented the sander for a day thinking that would give us plenty of time. 

I got it home and started sanding at about 10 am. By 1 pm it looked like I had barely touched the floor. I was going through sanding pads like crazy and the old polyurethane was gumming up each one in record time. The old coating had ambered over time and the orange color was very difficult to remove. By the first day I had gone through all of the coarse sanding pads the rental place had given us and I was about to throw in the towel. The floor was sanded in areas and barely touched in others. It was so frustrating!

 

 

Sean got off of work and begrudgingly came to help (he was more than happy to say this was my project but was a huge help). I went in the next morning and got more sanding pads from the rental place and rented the sander for another day. We spent the whole day trading off hand sanding the edges and using the floor sander. The air conditioning had to be turned off so the dust wouldn't spread throughout the whole house. It was hot! 

 

 

All in all it took about 20 hours of sanding, and we probably could have gone longer but had to return the sander so we could leave for our trip. Talk about a miserable job. We decided there are things in life that you pay a professional to do and this is one of them. When I returned the sander to the rental store I was telling the guy there about our long sanding process and he said every floor is different....some people can whip through their sanding job in just a few hours and 3-4 sanding pads while other need it for days and use 30 pads (I think we used 28 on less than 400 square feet). I'm not sure what polyurethane the last people used on the  floors but it was more like resin. 

 

We vacuumed like crazy, took the dogs to the kennel and then I put down three coats of a water based polyurethane finishing up around 1am. I've never been so happy to leave on vacation in my life. Very grateful that job is done!