How to Refinish Hardwood FloorsHow to Refinish Hardwood Floors. Refinishing a hardwood floor can be pretty straightforward and simple if you know what you’re doing. The most important thing is to make sure that there is sufficient thickness of wood to begin with. There must be enough wood that will support sanding.

Most machines will take or remove one 16th of an inch of wood. This is to ensure that all gouges in the wood are no longer seen. Also that all previous finishes are removed. You must make sure that there’s enough thickness remaining in the wood to allow for one 16th of an inch to be removed. there must be enough to continue providing support to the floor.

Why Do Hardwood floors Get This Way

Floors that are getting thin are the result of many standings over the years. This is true for particularly older homes that have had hardwood floors installed from the beginning. They have had them sanded many times. If you happen to be the person who’s buying an older home with hardwood floors one of the things that you might want to look at is the thickness of the hardwood floor. Particularly if you are planning to re-sand or resurface these floors.

How to Refinish Hardwood Floors

Once you’ve decided to refinish your hardwood floor, always make sure that you sand in the direction of the grain. If you sand across the grain it will leave scratch marks all over your floor. This will basically ruin the floor. In order to get those scratch marks out of the floor you’ll have to remove more wood. Which makes it a lot bigger job for you to complete.

Sending the floor should be done with a belt sander that includes a vacuum. The vacuum will suck up all sawdust and small particles that could permeate the rest of the house making the cleanup job much bigger.We cannot emphasize this issue enough. If you want to avoid dust everywhere, use a vacuum that exhausts outside to remove over 90% of the dust from your home. There will still be some dust to deal with but nothing like there would be if you just allow it to float throughout your home. Also shut off the furnace fan to avoid any dust being sucked into the system and being redistributed through out the house.

Remove all Dust After Refinishing

Once you have finished sanding the next job is to use a tack cloth to wipe up all small particles of dust that could be on the floor. Also wipe the walls, doors and windows. Anywhere there could be fine particles of dust should be cleaned of all dust. The reason that this step must be taken is to avoid any dust remaining on the floor. Avoid it being held in place when you apply varathane or some other finish to the floor. These dust particles will really show up in the daytime light and ruin the look of your floor.

After each coat of varathane has completely dried, a light sanding with very fine sand paper is usually completed. This is to roughen up the floor a little bit and provide better adhesion. After this fine sanding, again use the tack cloth to pick up any particles that may remain. Add a final coat of finish. Then allow to thoroughly dry before placing furniture etc in the room.

Also follow the manufacturers steps outlined on the container for applying your finish, especially if you are applying more than one coat to the floor. Failure to follow the instructions could mean that you will need to re-sand the floor completely and start all over again.

Good luck with your hardwood floor refinishing job and let us know of any additional steps or comments that may be interesting to our readers.