How to Refinish Your Hardwood Floors

13 Materials
$300
3 Days
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Although it may take some practice and probably a whole weekend of your time (if not more!), hardwood floor refinishing is totally a doable DIY project! This post walks you through the entire process. Most of the work is in sanding wood floors before you apply the floor finish. Once you’re ready to put the hardwood floor sealer on, your flooring really comes back to life!

BEFORE YOU START HARDWOOD FLOOR REFINISHING, CONSIDER THE COMMITMENT!


When sanding wood floors if your floors have any buckling, high spots, warping or waves, you definitely want to sand those completely flat with a hand sander or belt sander before you can even start using a drum floor sander. Depending on how bad it is, you may decide that refinishing your hardwood floors is just not worth it.



Remove any staples or nails from the flooring. If your hardwood floors have been painted, you may want to strip the paint before sanding. 

Now you can start sanding wood floors with 36 grit sandpaper. Start by moving the floor sander in diagonal lines first. 


Once you start to see bare wood, that’s good news. You can move on to sanding with the grain.

Now it’s time to get those edges. The floor edger is designed to get into the edges of your room where the drum sander doesn’t reach.

Use a detail sander to reach the corner of our rooms.


Now it’s time to apply that hardwood floor finish! Woohoo…you’re almost all done. We used a floor finish wood block applicator. This part was really pretty simple, you just pour the floor finish into a paint tray and spread it out evenly with the applicator. 

There you have it! After all of that sanding wood floors, the floor finish really brings the floors back to life!


For tons more details and photos on how to refinish your original hardwood floors, be sure to check out the full blog post.

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Chelsea @ Making Manzanita
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