Our kitchen now, after refinishing the floors! |
Long story short, Colette and I discussed and researched every possible solution from the simplest DIY options to complete professional floor replacement. There's almost too much information available online on this topic, and at the end of the day it can easily all leave you flat-out confused and unsure about what will and won't work in your situation.
Should you do a complete sanding down to bare wood, and re-stain and re-finish? Will chemical etching and refinishing work? Will buffing/screening and refinishing do the trick? Or are your floors too bad for all of those and you need to either live with them as-is or completely replace them? And how do you know?
To be honest, I'm not 100% sure what the absolute best option was for our floors, but after picking one and then diving in and doing it, I feel like we made the right choice. Wheww....
The biggest obstacle was trying to pick a solution that would make a notable impact for dog-scratched (and just plain old/worn) floors. Most of what we read made it seem like complete sanding or replacing were the only viable options. But at long last we decided to give screening and refinishing a try and we are very happy with the results!
So onto our project. We started with the kitchen floors. First we removed all the furniture and then covered everything with sheet plastic (large box from Home Depot). Then we did a thorough vacuum and mop of the floor.
Next I rented a floor buffer at Home Depot and went to town. Warning up front: a floor buffer is a hard machine to operate - but after a little trial and error and learning to control the machine by brute force it's pretty easy to use. Took me about 20 minutes and a couple YouTube videos to figure out how to keep the machine from racing all by itself across the floor every time I turned it on.
I went through 4 100-grit sanding disks on this floor. Probably could have gone through 6, but after a couple hours of sanding the whole floor (and sanding the really bad spots again and again and again and again) Colette and I looked at the floor and decided enough was enough. (Note: we also used a pole sander and 100 grit screens to sand the edges all the way around the room).
Next step was to do tear down all the plastic. Then came a thorough vacuum of the floor, after which we mopped it and vacuumed some more and then mopped and vacuumed some more. There was a decent amount of dust, but it wasn't horrible and was nothing like what we would have had if we'd done a complete sanding of the floor.

It took 3 coats of the polyurethane to do the job. The 2nd coat goes down a couple hours after the first, then you wait a day and apply the third coat.
So after about 2 days worth of work, here is our new kitchen floor which we couldn't be happier with!
Thanks for reading!
-David