72 Year-old Wood Never Looked So Good

The floors in this home are the original hardwoods and have never been refinished and quite surprisingly they were still in decent shape. However, knowing what we knew about hardwood refinishing from our first home we thought we should have them refinished before we moved in. Honestly, I could not imagine having to move all our furniture all over the place to have the floors refinished so doing it before we even moved in our belongings was the obvious choice. We were lucky enough to have a little bit of a buffer moving out of our old home and into this one so we were bringing car loads of items as we checked on the progress of the flooring crew.  

PRO TIP: buying a house that is vacant is awesome because there aren’t a million different schedules trying to coordinate. Honestly can you imagine you’re closing on the same day as the seller is moving out? Talk about stress... We literally closed at like 10am and the flooring crew was there ready to work by 11am – thankful that we actually closed in time for them to come. More on the disaster of closing later since I’m still not over it…

Our home has hardwood floors throughout which I love and I really do not miss having carpet. The kitchen was interesting when it came to flooring. It was initially covered with some really psychedelic linoleum tile. Our flooring guy said that he was 99% sure that there were hardwood floors underneath (Hallelujah!) and that he thought he would be able to save them. He was only half right since there was hardwood underneath but it was not salvageable and we paid a little extra to add new hardwoods to the kitchen area. It makes a huge difference and makes it feel bigger (TWSS?).

Take a look at that tile – makes you want to say "bow chicka bow wow". Oh don’t worry I saved some that is still under the sink – maybe I’ll display it somewhere so I can never forget it.

They gave us some sample stain colors and anyone who knows me can attest that I cannot make up my mind because I am scared that I will hate the choice I made. Usually I am okay with this type of thing because nothing is permanent and can be re-done. This is usually true except when you spend a lot of money on refinishing floors; you don’t really want to say I don’t like my choice and change the stain color. I am sure that we chose the right color now after seeing them completed and looking at the choices below.

Thankfully (or not since it was the busiest weekend of my life) I was busy volunteering at the Junior League holiday shops or else I probably would have been all over the place “supervising” the flooring crew. RC would send me pictures of progress throughout the day which was just enough for me.  Then he sent me this pic 

and I started to get nervous…

We're Floored!

As mentioned in our first post our home was covered in the lowest grade, ugliest blue, “elementary school” carpet. We were happy to find that underneath the gross carpet were perfectly good hardwood floors. Albeit with scratches (more like gauges) and stains but they were there and perfect candidates for refinishing. We also took this as an opportunity to have them stained a little darker – there is just something so luxe about dark hardwoods. We also wanted to extend the hardwoods into the kitchen area that was covered in cracked ceramic tile. You can see here that the food prep area was of ceramic tile. NOTE: We discovered there was laminate underneath the ceramic tile installed by the previous owners. If you place ceramic tile over laminate your ceramic tiles will crack.

We decided this was something we wanted to leave to the pros to complete since neither of us had ANY experience with that kind of stuff and we figured with all the headaches it would be completely worth it. We received MANY recommendations to use Arlandria Floors a local flooring shop not far from where we live and they were comparable to big box stores. We were not sorry that we went with Arlandria Floors – they did such an amazing job and their customer service was top notch. They also used a sandless machine which was a plus since it would reduce (not eliminate) the dust that resulted from the sanding.

We were a little concerned that the REALLY deep scratches would be too deep to get out. It was obvious that when the renters moved their furniture out they took no care in making sure they did not scratch the floors in the dining area. You cannot even tell where the deep scratches are anymore.

They were able to add in the kitchen portion and it looks much better and is exactly what we were hoping for. The other flooring areas look more polished darker and they coordinate with our funiture better than the blonder looking wood.