To be cohesive with the rest of our flooring, we have laid new wood floors in one small room of about 130 square feet (which we're converting from a poorly placed laundry room to a walk-in closet). Next weekend we'll be staining and putting down two coats of oil-based poly. Due to fumes should we relocate ourselves and pets, and for how long? The answer would be yes were we refinishing the whole house, but I wondered about the smaller space.

The room is at the center of our house directly across from our bedroom en route to the bathrooms, such that you pass it all day. There are no windows. There is an attic fan just outside the room, though I'm not sure how much that will help as there's no window to pull air through. I suppose opening windows elsewhere and running the attic fan will limit the smell's ability to permeate the rest of the house, but it's winter and we won't be able to do that all day and night.

On day one we will be putting down stain. Day two, poly coat 1 in the morning and poly coat 2 in the afternoon. (The rest of the house has 3 coats, but for a closet we figure we can limit time and inconvenience with just 2.) We can't choose water-based poly for the lower smell and quicker dry/cure as the rest of the house is oil and it wouldn't match.

We have two cats and a dog. I'm extremely sensitive to smells, my husband isn't. He's proposed hanging a plastic barrier both to limit smell and prevent pets entering wet floors. We could also put our dog and one cat in the detached garage, and our other cat in the basement (doesn't mix well with the others), though if we ourselves need to relocate we'd need to load them up as well. Ugh!

Thanks for any thoughts.