It has carpet everywhere but the kitchen, bathrooms, and one bedroom. Nasty carpet, if we decided to keep it we’ll have it re-stretched and professionally cleaned before we move in. And carpet in the dining room :eek: Blech.
I assume (almost positive) that there is wood under all of the carpet. The 2nd bedroom has nice-looking wood floors.
We don’t have time to rip out all the carpet and re-finish the floors before we move in, and I doubt we have the money to pay a pro (and wouldn’t want to anyway.)
How feasible is it to do 1 room at a time? For example, rip out just the dining room, pull back the carpet a little into the adjacent room. Sand, prep, and finish the wood then cut the carpet nicely and install a transition strip. Ditto the process for the two other bedrooms, then hallway, and finally over a long weekend that we can ditch the kids and pets, the living room.
I’ve repaired and refinished a floor before, so in my head I can picture doing a room over a long weekend.
It’s feasible, but not efficient. I’m assuming you’re renting a sander, so that’s a major expense that would have to be repeated. The finishing process is kind of odiferous (more so if you use oil-based products), so you probably want to be out of the house while each of the three coats is drying. I’d say that if you have a long weekend where you can ditch the kids and pets, then you could probably do the whole job in one rather exhausting go. Sort of depends on what’s under the carpeting though – the carpet may be hiding all sorts of sins.
That’s one thing that’s a little scary, if we decided to go for it we might pull up the carpet to reveal ruined or patched floors…and then have no kind of flooring at all!
I also wonder if it’s one of those things that would be worth paying a pro to just bring in their pre equipment and sand it in a couple hours, instead of me wrestling with a sander all day and possibly screw up the job…
Sanding floors is an art. It’s easy to fup uck - get waves and pits and sand through thin boards and veneers. I am a VERY experienced remodeler, light builder, craftsman, etc. and I’ve found someone to come in and do the sanding for me every time. (We had a house full of crappy carpeting that turned out to cover mahogany and cherry floors - we restored all of them except a dining room that had been extended and was half plywood. That room provided a source to “mine” for repairs elsewhere.)
I’d suggest doing all the work yourself EXCEPT the sanding. Find an old guy who’s been doing it for years and make arrangements for him to squeeze you in, one room at a time, at his convenience. Many floor guys won’t even return calls unless it’s a job of certain size; the guy who says “Sure,” to a request to come sand one 10x10 room is the one you want.
I’m reminded of a middle years *Doonesbury *when Mike and Joanie were remodeling a loft condo - “Oak! Michael, we’ve struck OAK!”
Unless you have peeled up the carpet in the dining room, you can’t even be 100% sure there is a hardwood floor underneath if the house was built in the past 30 or so years. In newer construction, there’s a strong possibility that if a room was carpeted when the place was built, its floor will be chipboard.
Another horrifying possibility is that there are wood floors, but they’re trashed. At the minimum, the floors will have hundreds of nail holes around the edges from the carpet tackstrips, and there are probably dozens of thin wire staples scattered throughout when they tacked down the pad. The nails aren’t usually terrible to pull, but the staples tend to break off about 1/64" above the floor surface, so you need to dig in a bit to pull the stubs out. Leaving them in will lead to shredding the the sander, which is a bad thing. Don’t be surprised if there are round stains where over-watered plants used to be.
Something else to watch out for is if the floors have ever been refinished before. If they were, there’s a very real chance that you’ll sand right through the groove side of the boards, which will lead to either replacing the entire floor or looking for some old pro who can replace the individual damaged boards and have the finished floor look decent.
One thing that nobody’s mentioned - have you ever sanded and refinished floors before? It’s conceptually easy - sand it smooth and lay down some varnish - but all of the steps have a fairly high finesse factor, and any shortcuts will stare at you for years to come. It’s also got to be the absolute messiest thing you can do other than demolition. Floor sanding can raise so much dust that you’ll have trouble seeing, and unless you seal off every window, door, heat vent, electric outlet, etc., there will be dust drifting EVERYWHERE through the house. If you have any possible means to, take care of the floors before moving in any furniture so your cleanup efforts will be a lot easier.
It was built in 1956, so I suspect it’s all hardwood; on top of that the threshold from the dining room to the garage is bare on the end and exposes hardwood. Which isn’t to say that they’re not trashed, but they’re there anyway.
I’d replaced, sanded, and refinished one room where I removed/moved a couple closets. It turned out nice, but I take the point about trying to do an entire house…
I really don’t want to just put down new carpet. I’ll put laminate throughout before I do carpet again, I think.
I’ll just tell you my story as a cautionary tale, and hope this doesn’t happen to you.
When we bought our house we pulled back the carpet in a couple of corners and saw nice narrow-strip full-wood golden oak floors, so we hired someone to pull up the carpet and re-finish the floors.
When they pulled up the whole carpet, they found that around half the boards had great big nails pounded through them, presumably to fix floor squeaks. Oy.
So we paid them to replace those boards and finish the job - I mean it was either that or re-carpet, and I was dead-set against carpet. Fortunately it didn’t cost as much as you might think, but because they were filling in, they had to face-nail the new boards. But they did a really good job filling in the nail holes and although you can see it if you look for it, they aren’t obtrusive.
Anyway, the moral is, you can’t tell what’s under the carpet until you pull it up, and even if the original wood was nice, something horrible might have been done to it.
We paid somebody to do it and did our house in two halves. (My god, it was awful - but then you haven’t moved in yet. It was essentially like moving entirely, twice. Well, four times, since we had to move shit back.)
The second half was a nightmare for the poor floor guy. Evidently there had been a second fireplace at one point, unbeknownst to us. And there had been a fire. The floors had been painted with exterior paint. He had to source matching boards for some of it, and warned us that it was going to be noticeable (we kind of like the distressed look where the fire was, but it looks kind of meh in the nursery.) Trust me, unless you are a professional floor refinisher that side of the house was outside of your skill set.
So you never know what it’s going to be. I’m beyond thrilled that we did it, though. God, that carpet was so gross.
Built in 1956? You should be safe with wall to wall hardwood.
One flooring stunt I’ve seen with older (Victorian/Edwardian era) homes did the center of the room with yellow pine, fir, or some other relatively inexpensive wood with a fancy oak/walnut inlay or parquetry border. The intent was to use a rug in the middle, and at the time, the price difference between the two types of wood was enough to make this worthwhile.
Gak, yep it’s freaking disgusting under that carpet! Disintegrating pad and dirt. The carpet itself is old, I would guess 20 years from the style and wear. Not worth salvaging.
However, the good news: From the corners and sections we’ve peeked under, it appears that the floor has an ok-looking layer of finish, the pad isn’t glued down, and the installer didn’t staple the hell out of it.
We did find an ugly little water spot in one room, along with a patch that looks like maybe somebody spilled nail polish remover; the finish is gone.
But after seeing how dirty it is, my wife prefers wood floors that are in need to refinishing to somebody else’s nasty old carpet.
So the plan is to get out painting done, and rip up all the carpet. We’ll live with floors in need of refinishing and maybe refinish, carpet, or lay laminate as the condition of each room dictates.
Good plan, do the floors last. The carpets are your drop clothes (use plastic too so paint doesn’t soak through). Don’t refinish as long as there are outstanding projects that are potentially floor damaging.
