I just completed my first ever hardwood floor refinishing job. It wasn't hard, but extraordinarily time consuming.
When we had pulled up the carpeting in three of the bedrooms a few weeks back before moving in, we found that the floors had never been finished. On top of that, they had paint smeared all over from when the rooms were painted at some point - obviously without a dropcloth. I don't have any "before" pictures, but it was bad.
I rented a commercial floor sander two weeks ago and spent the entire weekend sanding down the floors in 3 rooms. That was tiresome and I used every muscle in my body. When I woke up on Monday morning, I could hardly stand up and walk. It took about 3 to 4 hours total for each room, sanding in various grits and sweeping between each pass, until I was down to bare wood. I had to get on my hands and knees to do the edge work with a hand sander and that was very time consuming, at least an hour or two for for each room.
I spent a considerable amount of time researching and deciding what product to use for the clear coat on top. We decided we didn't want to stain the floor, but rather keep it in it's natural color. I ended up using a water-based polyurethane on top of a base-coat sanding sealer. The nice thing about this stuff was that it was fast drying and cleaned up with water. I hoped that I could get the appearance out of it that we wanted, which was a high-gloss look.
I started Saturday, by sweeping everything (shelves, windows, baseboards, etc) and vacuuming, then, a damp mop over everything to catch any stray dust. I put down the base coat, let it dry (about 2 hours), then got on my hands and knees to do a light, one-pass sanding according to the instructions. From there, it was just time and patience layering the polyurethane one coat at a time. I got the final coat down late on Monday night and it turned out great. The photos can be found here http://picasaweb.google.com/Greg1992/FloorRefinishingProject.
The other hardwoods throughout the house looked great when we first moved in, but now they don't quite look as nice in comparison. I'll be doing the rest of the upstairs at some point in the near future, once we get some other more immediate tasks out of the way.
