Refinishing our Original Hardwood Floors
The year is coming to a close which means we’ve been living in our little house for just over a year now. Crazy! We moved an hour west from Columbus, OH to Springfield, OH to be closer to my new office. This is our first single family house we’ve lived in and we’ve been excited to dream up and start tackling home projects.
When we got the keys last December the first thing we did was start to rip up the old, thick dark gray carpet that covered the first floor of the house. The hardwood floors in the dining room were exposed and we could tell it continued into the living room under the carpet.
Spencer was nervous of the condition of the floors and what scary things lay beneath the carpet… but I’m more of a “let’s just go for it and we’ll deal with whatever it is” type of person. We were both pleasantly surprised with the condition of the floors. They were stained an orange-ish red color and there were some pet and paint stains, but overall they were in great condition.
We moved in that same weekend so we didn’t have time to remove the rest of the carpet in the two bedrooms, 4 closets and the hallway of the first floor. We were also busy planning our wedding so this project was put on the back burner until July. We also didn’t want to spend the money to rent a dumpster to take away the carpet all at once or have it all piled up in the garage, so we removed it room by room and set out small amounts with our weekly trash pick up.
The final room to take the carpet out of was our bedroom. In order for us to remove the carpet in there, I had to remove the carpet from our finished attic and paint the floors up there to have as our bedroom (a whole other project see pictures of that here).
The hardwood floors on the first floor run continuously in the same direction from room to room so if they were going to be redone they all had to be done at the same time. This is why we finally decided that we wouldn’t be refinishing the floors ourselves. We thought about this for a long time and knew it was a project we could tackle ourselves, but we are living here so packing up moving all the furniture from the first floor and learning to refinish 800 square feet of floors would be too much of an undertaking. We also decided that it’s such an impactful feature of the house that we wanted them professionally done.
After I did a bunch of research on local floor refinishers we got an estimate from Leininger Hardwood Floors and we ultimately decided to go with them. They fit us into their schedule super quickly. We had to work overtime to finish removing every single staple and every piece of the quarter round trim before they started sanding.
The Leininger team was efficient and communicative. They started on a Monday and they were finished by Thursday afternoon. During the week they reached out to us that they were concerned about the pet stains that were too deep to be sanded out, and suggested that we might want to go with a darker stain to cover them better. The stains were most prominent in the hallway and one of the bedrooms. Our inspiration photos we fell in love with were all of natural and light floors. We decided to chalk the stains up to character and move forward with leaving the floors their natural color! After seeing the finished floors I have no regrets. Check out the floor reveal reel!
The cost ended up being $4.50 a square foot which is cheaper than new hardwood floors would be, and they’re original to the house which keeps the character of our 1940’s home intact. We did the natural wood color (so no stain) and we went with a water-based finish instead of oil-based. The water-based finish prevents the floor from yellowing over time unlike the oil-based finish and is just as durable.
We are so happy with the finished results! The floors have completely changed the house and it was totally worth the investment to hire this project out. This was the first big project we had to budget for before we could start with any of the other ideas we have for this place.
