How to Refinish Hardwood Floors (What We Learned Doing It Ourselves)

Pull the carpet and scrape up the old flooring

Carpet, pad, tack strip and staples come out first. Then scrape up as much of the linoleum, vinyl tile and paper backing as you can by hand. We used a flooring scraper, or honestly, anything that worked.

Remove the adhesive with a floor polisher

Once the loose stuff is gone, rent a floor polisher with a wood tool attachment. The orbital polisher with the wood tool chews through gummy coatings and mastic and gets you down to bare wood. Don’t try to sand through adhesive: it melts, caramelizes and clogs the paper almost immediately.

Patch any damaged or missing boards

We had a couple of spots where walls had been taken out. Set a circular saw to the thickness of the boards, cut out the damaged ones, and break them out with a pry bar. Clean up the opening, cut new boards to fit, and set them with construction adhesive underneath and tongue-and-groove glue on the joints. Ours went in late at night with no lights in the house yet, but it got done.

First pass at 36 grit

I’d never run a drum sander or an edger, so the rental desk walked me through both, and the tips were gold. Raise and lower the drum while the machine is moving so it never digs in one spot. Raise it before you change direction. If you sand a room in halves, vary where you stop in the middle so there’s no line. And plan on about one drum sleeve per 100 square feet. The sleeve just slips over the drum with nothing holding it on; it fans out and tightens once it spins.

The goal of the first pass is bare wood everywhere. Go with the grain, because coarse paper leaves marks across it. The drum does the field of the room. Then run the edger at 36 grit around the walls, working it front to back instead of side to side so it doesn’t leave lines (it rides on two back wheels and the disc). Finish the corners with a mouse sander.

Second pass at 60 grit

Repeat everything from the first pass with 60 grit: drum, edger, corners. This pass is about taking out the lines and marks the 36 grit left behind. Vacuum before you switch grits.

Third pass at 100 grit

Same routine at 100 grit with the drum, edge and corner sanders. Now you’re getting the floor smooth and even and ready for stain.

Screen the floor at 120 grit

This is the step a floor pro told us most DIYers skip, and the one that can make or break the job. Return the sanders and rent a square buff floor sander with a 120-grit screen. Make one pass across the grain, then one with it. The square buffer doesn’t spin in one direction like the drum and edger, so it blends all their marks into one even scratch pattern, which is what lets the stain go on evenly.

Water-pop the floor

We went with a dark stain, so we water-popped first to keep it from going blotchy. Spray an even coat of water over the whole floor (we used a pump sprayer; a mop works) without flooding any spots. It raises and opens the grain so the stain takes evenly. Let it dry completely; we gave it overnight.

Stain

Sweep and vacuum everything first. Mix all your stain together so the color is the same across the whole floor, and plan your route so you work out of the house, not into a corner. Jamie put the stain down on an area no bigger than we could easily reach and I followed behind wiping it off, switching to clean rags often so I didn’t leave streaks. We used Varathane in Briarsmoke, a dark brown with a hint of gray.

Two coats of floor finish

Once the stain is dry, clean the floor again. Before you start, wrap painter’s tape around your hand and pat the T-bar and edger pad to pull off any loose fibers. Stir the finish, don’t shake it, or you’ll trap bubbles. Pour a ribbon about 2 to 3 inches thick across the room, spread it into an even coat with the T-bar, and use the edger pad along the walls. We used Varathane’s ultra thick floor finish, which only needs two coats. We let the first coat dry overnight and did the second the next day.