New Wood Floors

Finally after living in this house for 10 years we are doing some major changes, ascetically at least, to the inside. The carpet has been in pretty bad shape for a while. Jabran wanted to rip the carpet out and refinish the floor. I was hesitant, as I'm on the floor a lot with the girls and didn't think it would be real comfortable. But after asking around what other people's experiences have been with carpet and hardwoods, everyone said they preferred the hardwood floor. Now that Isabel is pass the crawling stage, I was ready to rip the carpet out too. Here's what we found underneath. If you look closely at the living room floor you can see a diagonal mark across the length of the room. Looks like there was a runner on the floor for a while at some point that left a mark. The floor looked okay, there were spots that needed to be replaced but for the most part we were happy with the shape they were in considering their age and being under carpet for so long.

On Thursday the 11th, the work got started. Luckily we were able to schedule the work to be done the same time our good friends, Chris and Tiffany, were on their annual FL vacation. We moved into their house while the work was being done. But we went by the house each evening to see how the work was progressing. The first night we found that they had done the first sanding and then put on the filler. We learned that they put the filler on the entire floor and then just do the second sanding to get all the holes filled. There was a bad spot in the hallway in front of the bathroom that needed to be fixed by taking out the wood and putting in new.

The second day we went back to check in and the sanding had started. Just the hallway and edges had been done at this point. And you can see the patch work in front of the bathroom was complete. We also were able to see how the vents were going to look. Over the weekend they didn't do any work but Monday and Tuesday they were able to finish the sanding and apply two coats of the Swedish finish. Jabran went by the house late Tuesday night to open up the windows. He said the fumes were so bad he could only stay in the house for a minute at a time, with his eyes squinting to reduce the burning. We checked out the house the next day to see how the fumes were and they were still quite strong but getting better. Thursday we moved back in. Here's the way the floor looked when we returned.

We are very pleased with the way the floor looks. We have to be extra careful with them for the first 90 days as the finish completely cures. We'll hold off on getting rugs until later. Now we are ready to start painting. We painted the office on Saturday. But our hope is to do the hallway, stairway, living room and dining room too. We should be pretty good at painting when it's all done.

Here's a before and after in the office.