The Secretary Cottage - Finished Floors!

For the past five months, we have worked tirelessly on our floors at the Secretary Cottage. For new readers, this is our turn of the century home that we purchased last October, and we have been working on it ever since.

The floors actually don’t look too bad in the original pics but believe me they were in bad shape. They had decades of layers of finish that had been applied over and over. The old shellac was peeling away in places, and it all was dark and damaged. Although I prefer lighter floors, if these had been in great shape, I would have never tackled this project. Since they needed to be refinished, we decided to do it ourselves and get them to their natural color.

This is where buying a century old home is not for anyone who wants perfection! Once we removed the dark stain, we saw that all the wood was not the same and had been replaced over the years with different types. I don’t mind it at all, and I actually love the differing tones. They also have stains that will never really go away, and again I am completely fine with it!

They are now clean and fresh. It has taken us months to accomplish (we only work on the house on the weekends), and we encountered so many obstacles. We have refinished floors before, in our previous home, and went into this full of confidence. The house had another idea in mind and really kicked our behinds with the amount of work the floors took! I guess oak floors in a house built in 1965 and hard pine (and other wood) that has been stained and shellac for a century are really two very different projects!

Mind you, we are doing this project on the weekends and free days, and it was difficult to plan accordingly with the rentals and the timeline and process that had to be followed. We rented the equipment and honestly some of it was better than others as far as condition. We rented from both a local store and Home Depot. On some weekends we had better machines than others, and one in particular kept shorting out our fuse box. Highly annoying! We would rent on a Friday to keep it though the weekend. First the main sander, then the edger, then the buffer. I think I have sanded wood floors PTSD!

We persevered and are very happy with the result (my husband is still irritated at these strange circle stains that just will never go away!) Here is the video!

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