I like to make analogies between my old house and an old man or woman: Getting 50 or 70 year old wood floors refinished is like bringing a middle aged person home from the hospital and giving them PT until they spring back like new. Getting 140 year old floors refinished is like bringing a 90 year old person home from the hospital and needing round the clock care and knowing you might have to call in hospice. I owned a home with 160 year old floors. The honest and good floor refinishers I spoke with told me I needed a flooring restoration professional, not just a refinisher. I got enough quotes and people to look at them that I could tell who was going to do a crappy job and who was going to turn me down because they couldn't do a great job with what was there. None of the top notch restoration pros wanted to do my medium sized home in the city as most did massive projects on gigantic historic estates out in the burbs with tremendous budgets. They were usually hired by architectural firms and contractors who specialize in this. Our floor had splinters, gouges, nails, you name it. There was not much left to be sanded and little gloss left on top. Many who came to give me a quote said it needed to be replaced, which kind of killed me, and I never had the heart to do it. Unfortunately, it took me until we were staging the house for sale to find a good solution: I had leftover milled planks of heart pine from the 1850's that I had used for our kitchen floor. A handyman used the extras to cut in patchworks to the really damaged areas. I then mixed stains to get a good color match and stained the patches myself. (Sometimes you can take flooring up from closets to make patches, but that had already been done in our house and no good closet flooring was left.) I colored in discoloration and gouges with stain pens. It was like a huge coloring book and incredibly meditative and satisfying. I purchased very large jute rugs from Facebook Marketplace that probably "fell off a truck". The colors blended well with my floors, covered the most offending markets, yet still left enough of the historic floors visable to be appreciated. After 9 years of living in a house where I had to tell guests - "Don't take off your shoes or you might get a Civil War splinter!" I was able to now be barefoot in my own home. Ultimately, your pros butchered parts of your floors. But I don't know that someone else would have done a much better job with such soft historic floors, and these folks might not be able to do any better of a job trying to repair their mistakes. And, nobody would have made them look new. You've gotta embrace imperfection when you live in a house that is so old. I feel your pain!

Your first picture shows very faint evidence of chatter, which you can read about online. It generally involves vibration in the drum/belt sander, which requires inspection and repair. Removal requires starting over. Using a multi-plate sander like a Lagler Trio in the regimen generally eliminates chatter. Your second picture shows some light swirl, which you're likely to have at least somewhere on every floor. Your picture can't be used for evaluation since it's obviously taken to close to the floor. The generally agreed upon height for evaluating a wood floor is 50". If you have some light swirl that's not apparent from 50", it's not an issue. If you can see it from a standing position, it is an issue. There's a fine line between sanding the floor so slick that it won't absorb sufficient stain, and leaving faint swirl marks in the floor. It's not unusual to see swirls in the dry stain which don't show up in the finished product. I've seen this before and panicked, but it went away with the finish application. Penetrating stains are used on flooring, so when you get some on the raw wood during staining, it's taken care of by the staining and wiping, as is any dust that might get on the floor.

Sorry - they were kinda hard to see the problems they were taken, but here's what i have. I forgot to mention in the same room there is also what appears to be some stain buildups in between the boards. He said he would try his best to fix that too before the final coat of poly. I'm hoping he can fix everythign easily, but I'm a naturally pessemistic person, and just trying to get semi-informed so I can speak intelligently about what he's going to recommend Before (showing what i think is bleedback) And After the spot fix (there are three "bad" areas that generally look the same Board Gaps

How did the installation go? Did you end up changing the installation method? How do you like the floors? I'm thinking of putting Opus brand floors in my new build, so any feedback would be helpful. Thanks!