Anyone here ever restore wood floors?

[MikeF]

It's extremely hard work to finish it yourself (I've done about 1000 sq ft over the years).

Professionally, it runs $2 - $3 sq ft for sanding and 2 coats of polyurethane. Well worth it.

If you decide to do it, you need to get a good floor scraper to get all the "crud" off. In an ideal situation, you take the baseboards off. You need to go over the floor with a fine tooth comb looking for any nails/metal that will destroy the sandpaper (they're called shiners). Then you start sanding and it is very dusty. You fill any big holes and gaps, and sand some more (multiple grits). The square finish sanders are safer to use than the drum sanders, just take longer, and both weigh up to 100 lbs. The professionals use an extremely high quality sander more like a giant belt sander to prevent gouging the floor (which is common with a drum sander). Many vacuumings to get rid of the dust and then polyurethane, light sand, re-vacuum, then poly again. It's many hours of work...

[Carm]

Labor intensive. Especially in that condition.

Carm

[Dennis S]

I say resolve yourself to refininishing the wood, regardless of the labor or time involved. I think a beautiful wood floor is a hundred times more appealing than 2nd choice. If you do a good job sanding, and there's no reason you shouldn't, the floor will be in excellent shape again. Do your research on the finishes in the meantime. Check out waterlox.com for tung oil finishing.

[mikebw]

Just had an idea, probably not even possible but what about ripping up the entire floor and flipping the wood upside down, then polishing that side? You would still need to make sure it was flat (so lots of scraping) but the underside of the wood is probably in great shape and it wouldn't really matter how much damage was done to the old exposed side.