This weekend we rented a floor sander from Home Depot and set about tackling our new wood floors. Chris used 120 grit sandpaper and 4 passes. We also had to scrub the pencil marks off and do the edges by hand. (We used 80 grit on the edges and it turned out pretty uniform).

The next step was to apply conditioner and then rub it off. This photo shows the floors with conditioner, it didn’t look any different but you could definitely feel a difference.

Then we applied the stain. Unfortunately the color was very anti-climatic and basically looked exactly the same but with some shine. We used stain and polyurethane seal in 1 which is probably why the color was so light. We’ll try a second coat today and see what happens. We have to sand it with 000 steel wool before applying the second coat though.

Here you can see the color of the living room next door, the color of the raw wood without any conditioner or stain, and the color of the stain. It’s easy to tell the difference between the stained and unstained here, but you can see it has a long way to go to look like the rest of the house.

We’ve got the back downstairs bedroom to tackle today! I think now that we have a system it’ll go a lot faster.