We just sanded the finish off our 50 year old hardwood floor. After much debate on natural v. stain, my husband won out and stained the floor ebony. Most of it is fine, but in certain places there are inexplicable darker areas, with weird shadows appearing whose cause we cannot identify (the wood did not appear to be darker in those places before we stained it). It looks kinda… bad.
So the first question I have is, will 3 coats of semi-gloss polyurethane even that out? Right now, without the poly, we really don’t like it, so unless the poly is going to bring the magic, we’ll have to resand, and try the floor without stain. It looked so nice when it had no coloring on it.
The next question is, when you buff the poly between coats, what grit sandpaper do you use?
Also, if you have any awesome tips for how to do this job better, we’d appreciate them. We’re flying by the seat of our pants.
It is too bad about the stain not looking good. I do not think the poly will fix it.
I recently sanded my hardwood floors enough to get them smooth, but not take the old stain off. I then gave them three coats of poly. That stuff is tricky to work with. One thing I learned the hard way is not to allow any drips onto the floor in an area that you are not immediatly working with. My thought was I would smooth out the drips when I got there a few minutes later. Those drips start to dry very fast and leave circular outlines when they are covered over with fresh poly. I hand sanded with about a 220 grit between coats and then tack ragged. It was a bigger job than I anticipated. I was fairly happy with the results, but there are a couple of streaks where I went over areas that had already started to dry.
Depending on the type of wood, it is probably blotching. Some types of wood have grains that travel in different directions in different places and so do not absorb the stain evenly. One trick is to apply a wood conditioner before you stain. Wood conditioner is basically a clear stain. This fills the pores and causes later coats to be absorbed more evenly.
We probably should have used that shellac… however, these blotches are much larger than one board. They actually look like shadows, elongated over 10-15 boards, like what a lamp would cast longways across the width of the boards, not the length. They are really weird-looking. You couldn’t see them at all before we put the stain on.
As for what the blotches could be - who knows? Sun fade, water damage, etc.
The bad news - you probably can not sand the floor enough to remove the stain without irreparably damaging the floor. Regular tongue-and-groove flooring can only tolerate two or three sandings before the wood gets so thin that the wood over the grooves snaps off.
Here’s a pic of typical T&G flooring. There’s only about an eighth of an inch total that can be sanded off a board before you run into trouble and the joints fall apart.
You may be able to even out the stain by re-staining the whole floor or even selectively re-staining light areas. Whether this will work well or whether it will look worse remains a mystery, since you’re the only one here that’s actually seen your floor.
If you’re really unhappy with how it’s looking now, this might be a good time to call a professional floor finisher and see if they can salvage things.
It’s a 3/4" floor and my husband is already halfway done sanding off the ebony, so I think it’ll be OK. He needs to hit it with the finer grit to get it out of the grain, but I think we’ll be able to save 'er.
The lesson learned is that we should have done what RedSwinglineOne suggested. My husband wanted to do it but the guy at Home Depot said it wasn’t necessary. Grrr. Anyway, I liked the floor natural better anyway and was overruled. What sucks is the money that has to go into renting the damn floor sander again. That I could have lived without.
You might want to ask this question over at gardenweb.com . They have a flooring forum that has some experts–might be able to help. I’d also look into using tung oil as a finish instead of poly. Good luck.
The dark stains are the tormented souls of people who have died in your house. Unfortunately they can’t be painted over, you’ll need to call an exorcist.