tired of the chaos

a few weeks ago, we finally decided to get our hardwood floors refinished.  we have pretty floors, but there are some water stains, furniture/rug stains, and not much poly left on them from the decades of use without refinishing.  so, we got a VERY reasonable quote (maybe too reasonable, looking back :)) and thought now was a good time to go ahead with that project. 

we thought timing the project around our trip to boston would be a good plan since we'd be out of the house for a few days, and so we made the arrangements to have the work done, moved all of our guest room furniture into our room and all of our living room furniture into the dining room, and expected to come back to two rooms looking perfectly new and refreshed.  well, we got our hopes up a little too much and were pretty disappointed to come back to mediocre-looking floors that had been "screened", which i guess is similar to sanding but doesn't take off a layer of the wood.  it only removes the pre-existing poly, so that works well when you don't have significant stains, sun damage, etc.  we had told the contractor to sand the floors if he didn't think they would look uniform with the screening, so we thought he would follow through on that.  it was not the case, so the past week and a half, we've been living in chaos, trying to squeeze between pieces of furniture to even get into bed (which is the guest room at this point), and trying to keep in mind that the end result will be worth it :)

after we got back from boston and weren't overly pleased with the screening results, we asked the contractor to sand the dining room and master bedroom, and then he'll go back and sand the living room and guest room that he had already screened.  definitely the right choice!  even though we're now on day 12 of the madness, we are excited about how good the floors look and that we'll hopefully get back to living normally within the next week. 

sanded dining room floor

sanded master bedroom floor

our living room (complete with 2.5 rooms of furniture in it!)

our guest room (where we're currently sleeping, along with dressers and huge armoire from our bedroom)

the positives about all of this madness are that we're going to have really pretty hardwood floors when it's all finished, and it's going to be easier to make any furniture/decorating adjustments we want to make.  like possibly moving the main living area to the living room rather than the basement man case :)

i'll be sure to post some "after" pictures, hopefully in the next week!!