I had Friday and Monday off from work. Sounds like a relaxing 4-day weekend! However, the opposite is true, it was a near-constant tumult of rental vans, heavy equipment, runs to the hardware store, and fitful sleep the entire time. Our friend kept saying that refinishing our own floors would be "gratifying" but I didn't start feeling particularly gratified until late last night, when the second coat of polyurethane went on.
We refinished the subfloor in two rooms on the 4th floor. Much of the floor is fairly intact, but a lot was seriously yucky. We got some salvaged floorboards from our friend who's a lot more savvy than us on these things, with which we replaced the worst of them. We rented a drum sander and were told we wouldn't need the heaviest grit (16) since our floors are pine. Again, the opposite is true. Pine though they may be, the floors had many layers of gunk on them, from old adhesive to paint to what may have been stain. It looks like we weren't the first ones to think of using the subfloors for this purpose.
When you read up on floor refinishing, you see these pictures in which a drum sander coasts across a floor, effortlessly removing every bit of finish in one pass. It looks as easy as vacuuming. This was not the case for us, the old finish/paint/gunge didn't want to come up so easily, even with 24-grit sandpaper. It took many a pass to get things cleaned up, plus some nonstandard use of the edger (which came with 20-grit paper and worked like the dickens until the paper ripped at which time it would leave black gouges on everything it touched).
Between the drum floor sander, the edger, the little belt sander and the paint scrapers we eventually got things down to bare wood. It looked pretty good, but due to wide variation in plank quality, as well as all the patching that was necessary, we pretty much had to stain it to conceal some of the shortcomings.
Staining was a lot easier than the previous tasks, and compared to that stuff it's pretty hard to screw up. Then the polyurethane was applied. And it's still not finished. Tonight I gotta caulk up some of the larger gaps between planks. Then we add another coat of polyurethane, and I think that'll be it. God, please let that be it.
um jimmy ? please tell me u sealed the wood first .