Refinishing Your New Home's Hardwood Floors

Whether you have bought yourself an older home or are looking to sell your older home with hardwood floors, it can be a great investment to take the time and refinish those floors to restore their natural beauty.

Hardwood floors are a desired feature in homes all across the country, but in older homes they are often in not very good condition. The wood floors often used in homes being built currently is often an engineered flooring constructed with layers of thin wood sandwiched together with an adhesive and finished with a hardy baked-on finish; these types of engineered floors tend to withstand quite a bit of abuse.

Older homes more often have a solid wood plank type of hardwood flooring that might not hold up as well as an engineered type of flooring but it can be refinished very successfully. The keys to refinishing a hardwood floor are dust containment and sanding.

Before you start, remove everything from the room that you'll be working in and hang plastic sheets in the doorways to help keep the entire rest of your home from getting dusty. Rent a sander from a home improvement center that is appropriate for the task at hand. Starting with courser grits of sandpaper, sand your flooring to remove the old finish and improve the appearance of the wood. Talk to an expert at your local home improvement facility about the particular grits of sandpaper that your floor will require for best results. Progress from course sandpaper down to a fine paper to ensure a smooth luxurious finish to your floor.

After your floor is sanded, vacuum up the dust with a shop vac; your regular household vacuum can become clogged by the fine dust created by the sanding process. Wipe down the floor with a tack cloth to remove all traces of dust before adding the finish to ensure that it goes on satin smooth. Apply your chosen finish as directed on the product.

Once the finish is dry, buff the floor smooth and then vacuum and wipe down the floor again so that you'll not just be sticking the dust to the floor with the next coat of finish. Some types of finish require two or three coats for best results.

Most types of finish will require you to let them cure for a few days before you start to use the area again; make sure that you let the finish have at least this long to harden completely so that your hard word isn't ruined by furniture feet on the floor. A refinished hardwood floor can look beautiful for years to come if it's treated properly and can be a great selling point to prospective buyers as well.