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Friday, June 11, 2010

Floors on a budget!!

Okay, so a few days ago I posted about our bathroom redo on a budget. Well, after the bathroom was done, we moved our focus to the floors. They were covered in carpet, and one of the rooms had BLUE carpet. After pulling back the corner of the carpet, I discovered that the house had beautiful hardwood floors underneath. So, needless to say the carpet went away this week.

The first step was to pull the carpet up, just a tip to anyone who has never done this before, remove the molding around the floor first. I makes it much easier.

Once all of the carpet was up, we rented a floor sander from Lowes. You can rent them for around $40.00 for an entire day. So, guess what we spent the day doing, that's right, sanding, sanding, and more sanding. Here are a few pictures of the process. (excuse the ugly hair, but I was working on the floor).


Next we cleaned and wiped down the floors with Acetone.
(My handy hubby cleaning the floors)

The next step was to stain the floor. I was a little worried how this would turn out, but to my surprise it was very easy and turned out well.


After staining came polyurethane. Once this was applied and had time to dry, we sanded some more. This time with a hand sander. After cleaning the floor again (this time with only hot water) we added the final coat of polyurethane.

After sanding the first coat of Polyurethatne.

Finished product!!

These are the finished floors. We did three rooms in total.

So our total for this project was:
Floor sander $40.00.
Stain (2)cans $7.18 each
Polyurethane (2) Gallons $26.98 each
Acetone $6.98
Sandpaper we already had on hand.
Total = $115.30

We refinished the floors in three rooms in our house, so if you divide the cost up by three rooms, it works out to be $38.44 per room.

Just a note about a couple of the items purchased, the stain and polyurethane will both be used for other projects because we have a lot left over.  The total for revamping our hardwood was much less than purchasing new carpet, so I think we came out ahead of the game.

Have you recently completed a "do-it-yourself" home improvement project?  Leave a comment or link and share your story.

Stay tuned for the next couple of projects, we will be making a head board (very creative and frugal) and making a bench (also very frugal).  These projects will be built with items that are repurposed.

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