This past week I spent some time finally refinishing my floors in the lower section of the house. It was lots of work, but overall I think refinishing the hardwoods was worth it. I’m very thankful that my parents and brother came up to help out as well, since I only had the drum sander and the powered scraper for the day. Overall, I think I spent about 9 hours sanding off the previous finish of the floors and removing glue from the floors.

 

Then it took another 3 days for the polyurethane to go down, dry, and cure. It was a bit unnerving since I had to leave my larger furniture out on the front porch for that whole time. I had thought about moving it upstairs, but it’s too narrow to move couches up there. But the porch is covered at least and we put plastic over to it to protect it hopefully prevent any other problems.

The area in the last photo is where the new kitchen is going to go. As you can probably see here, we didn’t really spend any time around the outer edges of that room, since I’m going to putting in cabinets covering up all of that. There’s also going to be an island covering up part of the center area where we’ve filled in the floor with a 1 x 8 oak plank. Most of the scraping we had to do was in this area. Even though there is still some glue in areas that we couldn’t quite get up in the amount of time we had, I think it turned out pretty good. 

That was the area on the left side near the wall, even after scraping it for about 2 hours.

The floors are essentially done now, though. So I can now move onto putting in my baseboards, finish trim in some of the rooms, and move onto the kitchen.