Hardwood Floors

Both of our girls have dust mite allergies, and their doctors have recommended that we remove the carpets in our house. This is all well and good, in theory, but getting it done is a different story. We got the go ahead from our landlord to remove the carpets from our  house. Of course, as long as we pay for it ourselves.

We started looking for contractors that could give us a decent bid, and that wouldn’t take too long to do the job. The lowest bid we could get was for around $2000. Of course, we would have to move all of our furniture to the garage and make scarse for about a week. The only problem is that we live in our house.

We thought about it, and we decided to do it ourselves, one room at a time. So far I’ve spent two weekends. One for the living room and the other for the dining room. It wasn’t too difficult. The hardest part was having to scrape off the bottom layer of carpet padding which was fused to the wood flooring. I’ve spoken to others who had similar experiences. They all shudder when I mention the burgundy carpet padding. Apparently, the people who installed the carpet just put the new carpet and padding over the old padding (circa 1970′s old). Probably because they didn’t feel like scraping it off themselves. Really? Thanks! Awesome. That stuff was like plaster in the high traffic area. I had to scrape it off on my hands and knees, with a putty knife.

After a whole day of scraping for each room, I rented a floor sander from the local Home Depot Pro. I only needed it for for less than four hours each time, so both rentals ended up costing about $100 together. The most costly pieces of equipment were the sand paper sheets for the floor sander. The sell them only by the sheet, for more than $6 each, and I needed about a dozen. The next time, I’ll buy the sand paper in bulk, online, ahead of time.

After sanding and vaccuming, I sealed the floor with three coats of water based polyurethane. We had the leave the rooms sealed off for about a week, each time, to let the polyurethane off gas. Now, we have nice shiny hardwood floors.