It’s been a busy couple of months in the LRL, and slowly but surely our house is coming together. The last time I updated here I mentioned that we were planning to paint the wood floors in our guest room because the wood underneath the carpet was beyond our DIY rescue capabilities, but our good friend Ken stepped in and loaned us his drum sander, giving us new hope for refinishing those floors with wood stain and polyurethane. It took us a long time to get all of the materials together, but two weekends ago Javier and I (but mostly Javier) finally got around to refinishing those floors.

I’m not going to post a step-by-step guide to refinishing floors (there are plenty of those online) but I will say that we saved ourselves a great deal of cleanup time by covering the vents with cardboard and sealing off the door to the closet and the bedroom door with painters tape and towels so that the dust from the sander didn’t permeate the entire house. We still found a thin layer of dust covering the entire house, but it was manageable and not an inch thick.

The color of stain that we chose doesn’t match the living room floors perfectly, but I absolutely love the rich dark color. I truly thought that those floors were beyond repair, so this improvement is far above anything I had anticipated. We decided to move all of our bedroom furniture into the guest room and go back to the wood floors in our room while we had all of the materials and refinish those floors as well. I’m guessing this will be a summer-long project, because we’ll also take up the carpet in the office and re-do those floors, but I’m out of town on tour until July. Little by little it’s coming together!