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Fixing a bad DIY floor job?

17 years ago

No, we didn't do it ourselves! Our 80 year old rowhouse still has the original hardwood floors. Given their age they are in pretty good shape, EXCEPT that it looks like a previous owner did a DIY refinishing job, and a pretty bad one at that. The entire floor is covered with wavy parallel grooves, some of them fairly deep. There is also a miscellaneous accumulation of 80 years of nicks, scratches, scrapes, and gouges--again, including a few long, deep ones (are people really too stupid to LIFT heavy furniture across a wood floor?). I'm not sure what kind of wood it is, but the floor is stained a very dark brown and polyurethaned. It doesn't look too bad from a distance, but close up you can see just how bad it is.

My partner and I are getting ready to do a major home renovation project and as part of it would like have the floors refinished (professionally!), and preferably with a lighter stain. I think (hope!) most of the shallower grooves can probably be sanded out, but I'm sure we're stuck with the deeper ones. How bad is too bad to fix, and are we stuck with using another dark stain to hide the grooves or is there any hope of going lighter?

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Comments (4)

JohnnieB
Original Author
17 years ago
Not one person willing to comment? Maybe if I phrase the questions more simply:

1. How easy is it to get grooves, gouges, etc. out of an older hardwood floor?

2. How easy is it to lighten a darkly-stained floor?
glennsfc
17 years ago
Yes they can be restored...I do them all the time. I just finished working a douglas fir floor that had been badly abused over the years and it looks great now. It may still be a 'sow's ear'...but a pretty one, nonetheless. Not all damage done to a resinous specie, such as fir or pine, can be completely removed. Some of the compression damage from decades of treading on the stuff and dragging heavy objects across it can leave damage that is more than skin deep.

As for removing stain...all depends on what specie the floor is and what staiun was used (if any).

You need a professional who restores floors such as yours to have a look and give expert advice. This is a good place to start to get your bearings.
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ron6519
17 years ago
As old as the floors are, you need to hope that there is enough flooring left to sand. There is only about 1/4-5/16" of useable flooring in a 3/4" thick piece. After that you hit the tongue & groove part. You can get a decent idea by looking close to the wall. You should be able to see how much has been sanded.
JohnnieB
Original Author
17 years ago
I checked the edges near the walls and can't really see any difference so I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it has only been resanded once, but I could be wrong. I don't see any evidence that there was ever any wall-to-wall carpet laid over it, so maybe it has been sanded more than once.

We would like to have the floors redone with the rest of our renovations (we will be moving out) but depending on cost and feasability we may have to leave the downstairs floors as is as they will be unaffected by any construction. Upstairs will be trickier as we are removing a bathroom that was added on top of what used to be a wood floor, and I doubt there will be anything salvageable underneath it so we will have to have new flooring laid down, and try to match it to the old flooring.

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