When purchasing an older home where the plank strip hardwood floors require refinishing, it is best to arrange for professional floor refinishers to finish the floors prior to moving in. A fair amount of dust is created during the process of refinishing floors. In our marketplace, there are a fair number of quality floor refinishing products, so prices are most reasonable. The refinishing process removes scratches and surface stains and leaves the floors with a beautiful renewed appearance. Once you've decided on what stain and finish you'd like to use, our job would begin.

REFINISHING FLOORS AND STAIRS

1. You can prepare the room for the project or we can do it for you. All furniture needs to be removed. There should be nothing left on the floor. Remove pictures and other items hanging on the walls to prevent them from getting dusty. Using small sheets of plastic and masking tape cover all air vents in the room to prevent dust from spreading through the house in your HVAC system. Remove any hardware on the floor, such as doorstops.
2. If you have shoe molding or quarter round along the floor and baseboards in the room, you should remove it to get the best sanding results and to avoid damaging this molding with the sander. Use a pry bar and a hammer to carefully pull up the strips of wood. Be careful not to damage it so, if you wish, you can reinstall it later. Pull all the nails out and store the material in a safe place. Again, for a small extra fee we can do it for you.
3. First step of the resanding process involves use of the sander. We will start with a coarse piece of sandpaper in order to remove all layers of stain and urethane until we are all the way down to bare wood and the dents and scratches are mostly gone.
4. The sanding process would be repeated with the medium grade of sandpaper. To achieve a smooth finished surface the room needs to be sanded again with the finest grade of sandpaper.
5. Once the room is sanded, we need to use an edger to get even closer to the walls and into the corners. An edger works well in smaller areas such as narrow hallways, closets and steps.
6. Any areas that can't be reached with the edger can be sanded with a small handheld oscillating sander or a piece of sandpaper. Finally the room would be vacuumed to prepare it for staining and clearcoat.
7. If desired, we would stain the floor to match an adjacent rooms or to a chosen color. It needs some time to dry before we can apply the clearcoat finish.
8. Applying the clearcoat finish is a lot like mopping. We would use a lamb's wool applicator with a handle and a paint tray. The thin, even coat of the finish would be applied, following the direction of the wood grain. For better durability it is recommended to apply 2 to 3 coats of clearcoat, allowing each coat to dry for several hours in between. The final coat should dry for a couple of days before any heavy traffic or before you move the furniture back in the room.
9. The final touch is to install/reinstall base molding and quarter rounds along the floor.