There's a shallow crescent in our bedroom floor, about eight inches from the closet door, and I put it there at 9:40 on a Saturday morning. You can't see it most of the day. In the late-afternoon light coming through the dormer, you can't miss it.
Two weeks after we pulled up the carpet, we refinished the upstairs oak ourselves. A floor refinisher had quoted $1,950 for the room. We spent $410. The gouge is part of the price.
The plan and the rental
The room is about 260 square feet once you count the two dormers and the closet. On Friday, my work-from-home day, I did prep after work: set every nail head below the surface with a nail set so it wouldn't tear the sanding paper, vacuumed, taped plastic over the doorway and the top of the stairs, pulled the heat register and took the closet doors off.
Saturday at 7 a.m. we picked up a drum sander and an edger from Home Depot for a one-day rental, $148 together. Paper was another $96 for three grits. Water-based polyurethane, an applicator pad, tape, plastic and tack cloths came to $166.
We chose water-based poly for two reasons. It dries fast enough to put two coats down in one day, and it doesn't fill the house with fumes when you're sleeping one floor below it. It also keeps oak looking light instead of amber, which is what Tessa wanted.
Moose spent the day at Gary and Linda's. He's afraid of the shop vac, and a drum sander is a shop vac's angry older brother. From his point of view it was a vacation with someone else's couch.
Sanding, and where it went wrong
Carrying a drum sander up a narrow Cape staircase is a two-person job with a lot of talking, most of it about whose end is lower. We did it. Then I put in earplugs, safety glasses and a respirator and started with the coarsest paper, working with the grain in long, overlapping passes.
The one rule everyone tells you about a drum sander is that the drum must be moving whenever it touches the floor. You lower it while you're walking, and you lift it before you stop. I knew this. I'd watched the videos. About forty minutes in, I was near the closet when the cord caught on the edge of the plastic, I glanced back, and my feet stopped for maybe a second with the drum still down.
That's all it takes. The drum dug a smooth, shallow dip into the oak. I tried to feather it out with angled passes, which made it wider and a little softer but didn't make it disappear. A pro would have stopped there. I kept sanding the rest of the room and tried not to look at it.
After the coarse pass, the medium paper went smoothly, then the fine. Tessa ran the edger along the walls and into the dormer alcoves, where the sloped ceilings come down low enough that both of us hit our heads more than once. Corners the edger couldn't reach got a hand scraper.
The part we don't need to repeat
I'll be honest: this was not our best day as a couple. The room was loud and hot and full of dust that got past every mask and into every seam of our clothes. I had opinions about how she was running the edger. She had opinions about how I was running everything else. Around 2 p.m., after I suggested a different angle on the closet edge for the third time, she pulled out one earplug and said, "I love you. Go downstairs for ten minutes." I went downstairs for ten minutes.
We've already agreed that if we ever sand another floor, one of us does it and the other one goes to Gary's with the dog.
Finish, and what I'd change
We vacuumed twice, wiped everything with tack cloths and rolled on the first coat of poly around 4. It was dry to the touch in about three hours. The second coat went on at 7:30, and we ate pizza sitting on the stairs, looking at a floor that was shiny and honey-pale and very much ours.
The furniture stays downstairs until this weekend to give the finish time to harden. If I did it again, I'd rent the sander for a whole weekend so nobody was racing a return time, and I'd spend the first ten minutes practicing on a sheet of plywood in the garage. That's probably where the gouge would have happened, and plywood doesn't care.
$410 against $1,950. A $1,540 difference, one tense Saturday and a crescent by the closet that I'll point out to every guest whether they ask or not.
