I should have titled this post DUST DUST and MOTHER OF PEARL THERE’S SO MUCH DUST because that is really what happened. Having our downstairs floors refinished was such a big deal to us…it really felt like this huge grown-up thing to do, which I know is odd considering we’ve been working on this house for 3 years now and have had to do some major grown-up stuff…but floors…I don’t know there’s something about having floors refinished that makes you feel like “we’ve got this” though we sooooo don’t “have this.”

It was actually the only affordable bigger project we could do on our list this year, so we went for it. We considered doing them ourselves for a long time and worked it all out but the company we found was really reasonable and we decided to just let them help us…sometimes when you’ve had a really terrible year…you just need help. I am so glad we did because it was such a headache to even deal with them in the house let alone if we had to do it ourselves. We’ve been living on the top floor of our home for over a week now, and everything we own on the bottom floor is crammed into our kitchen. The dogs are going crazy, we are going crazy and I’ll admit that I had a scary stress cry when having to wipe all of our ceilings, walls, floors and everything we own down because it was all covered in dust.

Congratulations to all of you that were able to have your floors refinished before moving in…I hope you know that I am slow clapping at you and rolling my eyes because that was not an option for us.

Okay back to this being a really awesome moment! It is! Look at our floors!!! Andrew and I always planned to have dark stained floors because unless you have those gorgeous white (enter type of wood here) floors that make you feel like you’ve fallen into an Norwegian dream most floors come out rather orangish or yellowish or a terrible mix of both, which ours were.

HOWEVER, once we saw our sanded floors we started to rethink this. First, our home was built at two different periods of time so the wood is not the same in all three rooms. That would effect how the stain would look which doesn’t actually bother me but was one of the things we considered and were advised against. Then we really didn’t love any stains…we looked at so many. They were too purplish, reddish, or just not us-ish and many seemed too dated. You know?

The brand we used for coating the floors is a good company that has a product just for natural floors and we could also get it in a true matte finish, which we were excited about because we are not fans of shine either. We really did like how light all the rooms were with the natural wood showing through so even though we knew once the coating was put on, it wouldn’t look the same, nor be exactly what we wanted,  it was still going to be a huge improvement so we went for it. That was a scary moment.

Our floors have always been natural and it felt good to be able to leave them that way, not to mention not doing stain meant we really get to see the wood and that was something we didn’t want to lose. So no…they aren’t exactly what we dreamed about and the dining room floors are more yellow than we’d like because they are pine, but we really are so happy with them and are thrilled to have this project checked off.

I’ll be honest though…when we went to clean up all the dust we had literally only been in the newly refinished area for less than 5 seconds and Andrew dropped the vacuum head denting the floor AND before I could even recover from that, he knocked one of our shades off and REALLY dented the floor. I seriously felt like Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura 2 when he gets hit with two spears…here you go for reference. That is pretty much how I reacted too. I have no idea how Andrew is even alive right now and I am not wearing orange.

You’ll notice in the pictures our gross baseboard heaters without their top covers, we removed those for the refinishing but are leaving them since we’ll be replacing all of them…though they’ll basically be the same versions, we can’t afford the fancy stuff. Then we’ll have to go through and paint all of the shoe-molding and edges that the sander chipped up. We knew that was going to happen so luckily we’ve never painted them. Phew! Something we actually don’t have to paint twice. Alright here’s our freshly refinished floors, eeeeek!