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owl
Sanding wooden floors. I know a number of people have done this recently with enviable results, so I was hoping to tap into that knowledge. I have a couple of questions - pics of my floor below.
1. It looks to me as if our floorboards have had some rather hideous orangey stain/treatment at some point. Presumably this will sand off? The floorboards look a bit ropey to me compared to some of the examples I can find but I assume it's still reasonable wood, can anyone see any reason not to sand them back?
2. We have three rooms and one long hallway that need sanding. There is no way we can do it all at once (there isn't enough other space to put shit to clear all the rooms) - happy to follow the general advice of getting the pros in, but is the experience so terrible (dust, mess etc) that you'd recommend doing whatever we can to do over the same period (i.e. clear out two of the rooms and get them done in one day, then spend the night moving everything into the newly sanded rooms from the others to allow those rooms to be sanded)? I assume we really want to treat them immediately after sanding so possibly add another day either side of the moving to allow that to happen? I think ideally we'd split the job up and do a few months apart, but if the mess and horror is going to be so extreme maybe that is a bad idea...
Cheers!

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stevo_com in reply to @owl

The mess/dust can be fairly easily contained to the room you're working on. Open the windows and stuff towels round the door etc. So I reckon you could do it a room at a time if you wanted to. I would do the hallway last if it were me as that will obviously see most traffic and can't easily be blocked off for sanding/finishing. Rent the machine for two days with the idea of doing one room. You might get it done in day, but at least you'll have the option of taking it slower and working out how best to use the machine. Then when you do the others, you'll have the experience to just get it for one day to do one room, or a weekend to do two.

Those boards look fine to me. The stain is already scratching off, so the 40 grit belt you start with will rip it off no problem. Be sure to go around knocking any nail heads down below the level that will be sanded to. The belts will chew through them no problem, but the sparks + wood dust are a bit terrifying when it happens and you are essentially creating sharpened metal blades if you just sand through them.

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owl in reply to @stevo_com

This is great, thank you, albeit seemingly against the previous lufguss wisdom of "get Zen in"... i guess we could do the small spare room ourselves and see how much we hated the experience...

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