Sanding may be the single most critical step in the process; it largely determines the quality of the end result. The good news is that random orbital sanders are readily available for rent at your local home center. Be prepared to sand the floor three times, using a lighter-grit abrasive with each pass. First, set up the sander with grit sandpaper and, after donning protective eyewear and a dust mask, start moving the sander over the floor.
Remember to keep the sander level, and never stop the sanding disks when they are in contact with the floor. Finally, switch to or grit abrasive and sand one more time.
In any area where the random orbital sander is too large to reach, use a palm sander or a detail sander to achieve the desired level of smoothness.
At this point, your job is simple but painstaking: Thoroughly vacuum up the enormous quantity of dust created during the sanding stage of the project. Opt instead for a heavy-duty shop vac, fitted with a brush attachment and, ideally, a new filter.
Using a lambswool applicator, apply the stain to the floor, aiming for even distribution over one two-foot section at a time. Wipe away the excess with a rag before moving on to the next section. Rather, start the applicator a couple of feet away from the edge, then maneuver it to meet the previously coated section.
In the corners, or where the floor meets the baseboards, a two-inch paintbrush may prove handier than the applicator.
If so, apply a second coat in the same way that you did the first. If the scratches don't go all the way through to the wood, you can scuff-sand your floors with a buffer and apply a fresh coat or two of finish.
The hardwood floor refinishing process is easier and less expensive than sanding down to bare wood and takes less time. In a few hours, your floors will look as good as new. The job requires using a buffer, which you can rent at a home center, and a vacuum to suck up dust. Buffing hardwood floors can be tricky, so if you've never used a buffer before, practice in the middle of the room until you get a feel for how to maneuver it. Once the finish is roughed up, we put on a water-based polyurethane, which can be recoated in 3 hours.
Oil-based polys are cheaper, but each coat takes about 8 hours to dry. With either finish, we recommend a fresh coat every two years or whenever the floor looks worn. Stick to that routine and your floors will never wear out.
Pro Tip to Prevent Discoloration: Sometimes the tannins from your wood floor react to water-based polyurethane, causing discoloration.
To avoid this, apply a base coat before applying your water-based poly. Smooth the base coat out evenly around the edges with a paint brush. Smooth out the rest of the floor with a synthetic floor finish applicator and give your base coat about 2 hours to dry. The total cost includes renting sanding equipment along with purchasing sanding pads, wood stain, brushes and finish. You can almost always bet that refinishing is cheaper than replacing hardwood floors. Pro Tip: Don't use a sanding block for refinishing hardwood—it might miss uneven spots in the floor.
Looking for help with repairs around your home? A home warranty may help. Staining floors, especially for first-time do-it-yourselfers, is a tricky business. The most important reason to think carefully about staining is that it accentuates even minor flaws in your sanding job—flaws that would be undetectable in a clear or natural-finished floor. The larger the cavity, the greater the amount of pigment that will lodge there, and the darker and more opaque the cavity becomes.
When the stain is rubbed into the wood, the color is absorbed more deeply along the scratch lines than in the surrounding wood. In other words, staining a floor sanded by a beginner is a lot like putting a big, ugly tattoo on your floor. To make things worse, the edger see Sanding Equipment is particularly prone to leaving cross-grain scratches that, when filled with stain, are still more obvious because they run against the main grain direction of the floor.
There is no greater proof of an amateur job than edger swirl and cross-grain scratches that have been highlighted with stain. Before applying stain to your wood floor, you need to know what species it is. Floors made of maple, birch, and coniferous woods especially pine or fir are all very difficult to stain evenly. Maple and birch are tight-grained woods with very small pores, and the density of the pore wall fibers varies drastically.
In other words, the particles of stain pigment have fewer places where they can wedge themselves and those places are not regularly spread through the wood. Pine has the same variations in pore wall density, but to make matters worse, coniferous wood fibers contain resin or sap that actively resists stain. Even though stain manufacturers provide sample chips of stained maple or pine, do not be fooled; those sweet little chips are easy to stain precisely because they are little.
Over a large, uninterrupted area like a floor, blotching and mottling will be much more apparent. Red oak and white oak floors absorb stain more uniformly, but be aware that there is a difference between the density of earlywood or springwood and latewood of these species.
As you can see from the photo above right, the more porous springwood stains considerably darker than the dense latewood, giving the boards a distinct zebra-striped look. Once a customer understands the ramifications of staining a floor, the idea of a clear-coat finish starts to look very attractive.
However, if you are one of those stalwart types who, despite all the warnings, declares that you are ready for the challenges of stain, there are some things you can do to make the process easier and more successful. Stain is applied differently than almost any other finish: it is usually rubbed onto the wood with rags and then immediately wiped off.
The amount of stain that a floor can absorb is finite; the floor will not get darker if you flood it with an excess of stain or apply a second coat.
Using excess amounts or applying multiple coats of stain can cause the stain to 'bleed back,' where it wicks back up to the surface of the board as solvent begins to evaporate. Bleedback can also occur after a finish coat has been applied to a layer of stain that has pockets of uncured stain in the gaps between the boards, in which the pigment seeps up and into the clear finish, leaving a cloudy streak You can also get something similar to bleedback if you coat over a dried stain with an incompatible finish.
If your finish contains a solvent that can re-dissolve the binder in your stain, particles of stain pigment even if they were fully dry to the touch before top-coating will blotch or seep into your finish.
Using stains and finishes that are advertised as compatible like our products is the most foolproof way to avoid solvent interference. Latex paints have set very high expectations about drying and recoat times—expectations you need to leave behind if you are staining a floor.
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