Name: Claire & Jeffrey
Type of Project: Kitchen remodel
Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Type of building: Single-family bungalow, 950 square feet
The Renovation Diaries are a new collaboration with our community in which we feature your step by step renovation progress and provide monetary support towards getting it done in style.
We cleared out the room, cleaned up the floors, and rented a drum sander from Ace. 18 hours of hard labor (Jeffrey gets all the credit on this one), and about $260 will get you stunning floors. STUNNING.
Looking in from the living room. The view before the floor refinishing marathon.
Note the salvaged patch to the right in this shot. The drum sander we rented from Ace for $45 is to the left.
2am and the most exiting part! Staining the maple to ebony to match the rest of the house.
7am and time to poly.
Our new floors!
Estimated time for project: 4-8 weeks
Time remaining: 2-4 weeks
(Images and diary text: Claire Moyle)
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Those are stunning. It was so creative to use salvaged wood to fill in the spots that were missing.
Wow! Awesome job.
How many coats of poly did you use?
Sounds exhausting! But what a beautiful result.
I liked the way the salvaged wood looked, too. Before and after are both nice!
@macbride
We applied just one coat, let it dry, sanded lightly, and then covered the entire new floor in protective paper. We'll apply two more coats once all the construction and installation is done. The image above depicts just the one coat.
Inspiring! Cheers for your hard work!
You guys have serious talent. that is amazing.
This looks fantastic! I admire all the hard work that's gone into this so far.
I love this, our flooring guy (we rent but we are buying our house) told us we would have to redo all of our original (circa 1936) wood floor because we are missing a small patch, well now we dont :D
Wow, that turned out beautifully!
Hats off, fantastic effort. Looks beautiful. Can I ask why you did floors at this stage? I just wonder why you did them before the walls. Thanks
The floors look great! Definitely inspiring- we're in the same boat as foreclosure2frugal in our 1949 home.
A tip -- if you have hard wood in any closets, take the wood from there (it will be acclimated to your home) and put the replacement wood in the closet. We had to do this in our kitchen and a few other spots and it was great. The wood was the same, the color matched and there was no shrinking or swelling.
@Karen
That's a fantastic idea, I had never considered that!
GREAT tip!
Wow, amazing job! All of your hard work really shows :)
These look amazing! Sounds like a lot of work, but I am sure totally worth it!
www.foundafeather.com
09kez, you have to do all the sanding, staining, and sealing before the Sheetrock so you don't mess the wall up. After everything else is done, including cabinets, you can touch up the floor and put on the final coats of sealer.
wow!
Awesome. It's really inspiring....of the all these kitchen redo's i keep looking at how yours is going. I love how you are doing so much of the work yourselves.
Foreclosure2frugal - did he mean because of matching the color? We removed a gravity floor heater that left a hole on both sides of a wall (wall and floors). Patching the floors was a bit tricky because the grain doesn't match perfectly, and neither does the stain, but overall it looks pretty good and is not something people notice when they come over (of course I see it when I obsessively look at it). If we had the luxury of moving ourselves, our belongings, and our cats out of our house we would have refinished and restained all the floors, but it looks pretty good IMHO, especially since we did the work ourselves. I recommend pulling up a board to confirm what kind of wood floor you have (I had no idea there are two kinds/colors of oak) and then testing out stain on sample patches before you have at it. You can always sand and restain if it doesn't look quite right. The idea of using flooring from a closet is a great idea!
Thank you