Monday, July 18, 2011

Our Biggest Project Ever - Hardwood Floors

Our house has good bones. One of them is the hardwood floors. Unfortunately when we bought the house they were covered with nasty blotchy stains and weird dark discoloration around all of the baseboards. Not pretty. You can see some of the problems in these pictures.
The first step of the process was to remove all of the doors and then rip off the existing baseboards. Check out that discoloration! Gross.
Next, we rented a drum sander and an edge sander and got to work. It took some adjustment to get used to the sanders, but eventually we got into the swing of things.
You can see some of the stains in this picture.
And then...we stained the floors ebony! My reason for picking such a dark color was two-fold. The first reason was to hide the ugly stains in the wood. And the second was just because I've always wanted dark wood floors!
Here's how it looks with one coat of stain.
And here's coat #2. It was significantly darker than the first coat. I was thrilled!
And then after a big struggle with polyurethane (this was by far the most difficult part of the process) we ended up with this.
It's far from perfect, but it's pretty darn good for our first attempt! Now, once we finish painting the walls we'll install some new updated baseboards.

21 comments:

  1. WOW! Pretty darn good indeed! They look so much better than the last time I saw them; you guys did a great job! Maybe we can get back down in the next couple of weeks for a painting party. Goodbye "lime sherbet".

    Big Hugs.

    AK

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looks great so far!! I really like the way it looks after both the first and the second coat, depending on how dark your preference is. Anyway, can't wait to see it w/ the new baseboards and paint!

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  3. They look awesome!!! No one will ever know what a huge job this was--unless they have gone through it also. What a huge accomplishment. So proud for you all. Rhonda

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  4. it looks great, really truly, we are currently scrapping off glued on carpet padding off our hardwood floors and we are also going to stain them ebony for the very same reason, and like you I always wanted dark floors too, but its so great to see pictures like yours to get an idea of how its going to look!

    Robin

    blogger still won't let me post under my iD

    ReplyDelete
  5. Your hardwood flooring looks great so far! It’s amazing how dark it is. I have never thought of using ebony colors, but I have to tell, I like this dark flooring. Congratulations, great job indeed.

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  6. Oh my, I just LOVE the stain you have chosen and have just spent the last five minutes googling options here in Oz to see if I can get a similar look for our place when we renovate at the end of the year! Love them!! Nicolex

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  14. You were able to successfully apply polyurethane on your floors. What about your walls? What paint colour did you use?

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