I’ve been MIA for the past week or so due to the wonderful event of having our wood floors refinished in our 60+ year old home.  We hired a company called Long’s Pro-Hardwood to take over our house for a week and make our floors all purdy like.  Let me remind you that the floor in this house have seen better days…I mean a lot better.  The wood floors in this house not only have had mucho traffic pass over them in the past 60 years, but for about 20 of those years they were covered by carpet.  Carpet can suck every ounce of moisture out of floors and wear down the finish to nothing.  Basically, we were left with floors that look like this…

Pretty bad, I know!  To add to the shabby and far from chic floors; we also had to deal with two lovely plywood filled holes in the floors.

As you may know, when you get wood floors refinished you have to find some other place to store EVERYTHING!  So we looked into renting one of those “we’ll bring it to your home and leave it in your driveway” storage units, and finding that there wouldn’t be one available for us to rent until February.  FEBRUARY!?!  That’s like two months away and we had the crew coming in like four days to start sanding the floors.  That meant we were moving all of the furniture, rugs, and newly put up Christmas decor into the remaining 2.5 rooms of the house.  I say 2.5 because we could only use half of the kitchen.  The workers needed to use some of the outlets in there or something.

Having all of our stuff still in the house while saw dust would be flying about we decided to cover all we could in plastic. Seriously, it was as if Dexter were going to be our house guest.

So on Monday we handed over the keys to our sweet little home, and headed across town to shack up with my folks for the week.  Believe it or not, they even let us bring the two furry misfits with us.  During the day, Cohen and Wrigley were confined to the garage, and once we were home for the evening they chilled inside with us.  My parents were even kind enough to let our sweet babies sleep in the room with us.  Yes, we even brought the dog beds with us.  Three dog bed to be exact.  One for the garage during the day, and two for the bedroom at night.  So spoiled are they.

On Saturday, while I was at work, my dear hubby went through the house and wiped down all the walls, vacuumed all the floor boards, and cleaned all the blinds.  This saved me a lot of pain considering my sinuses would have made me miserable for the next 2-3 days if I had been involved in the dust clean up.  In all, it was a great experience.  We got to hang with the rents for a week, save money on not having to board the dogs, and get our ratty old floors gussied up.

I had high hopes for really dark brown floors, but Derek pointed out the fact that dog fur would show up extra easy on espresso stained floors; so we went a bit lighter.  The lighter color keeps with the era of the house anyway.  We are thrilled with the results.  Here’s the finished product.

This is one of the two areas where they added new wood to replace the giant plywood holes.  Pretty decent job considering they were dealing with new wood vs. wood with 60 years of dirt, grime, and lord knows what else mashed into it.  Heck, I’m just happy not to have plywood in my living room.

This is the second area they replaced plywood with new flooring.

We purchased new floor vents for the living and dining rooms.  I love these new vents.  They add just the right “Craftsman” touch to the house.

Don’t you just love the beat up floor boards? Me neither. Guess that’s what a sander will do to them.  Next project…repainting of the floor boards.

One day I may even post a few pics with furniture.  That’s if the couch we ordered ever comes in.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Daily, Home Renovations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.