So far ours has been a gain in square footage – for the first time since we moved into our home 2 months ago, we are able to exist on the main floor!
With the exception of our kitchen, we have been living with all of our worldly possessions on the 2nd story. One bedroom is a makeshift office with boxes, another is storage for more waiting-to-be-moved downstairs boxes, one we’re using as a temporary bedroom, and the last one…
…has been our walk-in closet-dining-office-tv room (aka dorm room).
While we’ve thoroughly enjoyed walking upstairs balancing plates of food or having to go back downstairs again to retrieve the forgotten salt, all good things must come to an end.
We’ve been working on a lot of projects downstairs to get it ready for living in, such as tearing out our built-ins and scraping off wallpaper, but the biggest project has been our poor floors that have seen better days.
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| entryway |
…and the stain didn’t even match between rooms.
Another problem was that no finish had ever been applied to the middle of the living room.
After days of our floor sanding and more floor sanding sagas, our heroes stainers came a few days before Christmas and stained and sealed our floors all in 2 days time!
Can I just say how amazing it was to sit back and let a pro handle a job?
Let’s see some of that new floor action:
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| it matches now! |
For those of you wanting all the nitty gritty info, we used a water based stain and finish, which indeed lived up to our expectations of being low on fumes and dried very quickly; we were walking in socks on the floors within 4 hours after the finish was put on. Pretty amazing.
They did 2 coats of stain the first day, then 3 coats of the finish in “satin” the 2nd day. Satin turns out to be a nice medium between flat and semi-gloss or gloss – it gives the floors a nice sheen but also helps hide any imperfections in the wood that would otherwise be more obvious with a glossier finish.
The stain color is “golden brown”. If you look again at the samples we had, it’s the one on the top middle:
It compliments the dark baseboard trim perfectly and we’re so happy with it…and so happy to be done!
We could have waited only 3 days before putting down furniture, but we decided to give it a full week to cure before getting the couch out of our kitchen (cause what’s a few days more of shuffling around our couch while trying to cook…you know we loved it!).
Here’s to getting our first major house project done! This coming year we will have many more projects as we tackle each room…it’s gonna be crazy. Glad y’all are along for the ride with us!
Note: if ever you need floor sanders/stainers in southeastern PA, contact me and I’d be glad to give our floor guys’ info! These floor-stain guys were outstanding. Not only did they do a great job on the floors, but they worked with us, listened to our concerns, were on time and courteous in speech, budget-friendly and made sure we were satisfied with the floors every step of the way.
Shared On: diylikeaboss
