DIY refinishing of an oak floor
If you have just bought a new home and you look at the floors and you don’t like the way they look, you start to think about what you can do with the floors. A couple things come to mind, one of them would be you might want to just simply sand and re- finish the floors and another one would be to simply pull up your floors and put down brand spanking new engineered floors. So this is a question: which one is more cost-effective which will give you more pleasure in the end.
Chances are you bought a house with the old type strip flooring with a skinny strips that are no longer in fashion anyhow. If you want to be cost effective and just want to make the room nice and fresh looking you’re probably better off just refinishing the existing floor if it’s in good shape.Here is your chance for some DIY refinishing, if your do-it-yourselfer and you want to do this on your own your best bet is to go rent a drum sander and an edge sander. The edge sander is for sanding around your floor edges by the walls.
You’ll probably have to buy a few rolls of paper starting off with: the course paper and then getting a medium and a fine paper. For both of the sanders. You’ll start out by using the coarse paper to get the bulk of the top layer off and then you use the next finer paper for one more pass and then use a light paper for the finish sanding. Also when you’re buying some paper for the machines you could have looked around for some filler for the hardwood this usually is a water-soluble filler that you place into cracks and crevices on your floors to make sure they will be nice and smooth. Once all the fillers dry then make one more pass over the floor with the finish sanding using the fine paper.
applying top coat to oak flooring
Now that you’re gone around your floor with the sander and all your edges are also sanded you can begin to stain the floor. Generally what I used for staining the floor it is stick with the square swivel head pad on it . I start at one end of the room working backwards I dip the pad into either a bucket or a paint tray with their stain in it. Don’t work yourself into a corner always work toward the door so when you are finished staining you walk away through the door entrance.
Next, you are ready now to apply the clear floor finish like urethane or polyurethane. Again using another pad don’t put it on so thick it’s heavy, better to do multiple light coats for two reasons — faster drying means less dust — create a smoother finish.
Next time I’ll talk about DIY refinishing with new flooring.
