Kitchen Floor - Sanding

Okay, so in my last post, I reminded you what the nasty green laminate looked like. I also showed you what the floor looked like when I finished scraping the laminate and cutback adhesive off.

But now, my friends, you get to see that floor really come to life! This next picture is my sweet husband sanding the floor with the big belt sander. You can rent this from a local hardware store. We were able to rent it by the half-day, which was great because this part only took us about an hour.

He used 60, then 80, then 100 grit sandpaper on the machine to really get down to the pretty parts of the wood. It didn't take off too terribly much. Seeing as how this is a nearly 300 square foot room and we didn't even fill up the catch bag on the machine once.

Here it is after the big sander. Already an amazing improvement. Also, I forgot to mention that we taped plastic to all of the doorways leading into the house so that sawdust didn't fill the house. We took the back door off of the hinges and left it open while we were sanding.

The next step is puttying any holes, cracks or blemishes, sanding over them, and sanding around the outside of the room with the orbital sander. I have not finished this yet. I will be working on finishing this up tonight. I will have pictures of the floor when I finish that.

After this is finished, I will be cleaning the entire room. I doubt you really want to see pictures of me cleaning, so I will skip that step. Then, with all of the dust cleaned out of the room, I will stain the floor, waking it back up. I should have pictures of that for you later this week.