I have to admit that I am a sucker for hardwood floors, but having hardwood flooring installed is expensive. So when my wife and I discovered hardwood floors underneath the carpet of our 1950’s home, we were overjoyed. I mean, “refinishing” an existing hardwood floor is hundreds of dollars cheaper than having new hardwood installed. Sounds pretty peachy am I right? I mean how hard can it be to refinish a hardwood floor? Well, here’s a handful of things that I ran into while I refinished our floors:

Carpet Leftovers: My floor had carpet laid over it…twice. I could tell by the two types of carpet pad that I found stapled to the floor. Prepping the floor requires hours of being on your hands and knees. I used a scraper to rip out hundreds of staples from the carpet pad and then pried the tackstrip along the wall. I did a room per day just prepping the floor.

Knife Cuts: Carpet installers don’t care what type of floor they are laying over. When they are hired to rip up carpet, the first thing that they do is cut the carpet into smaller pieces. They dig their knives through not only the carpet, but also the carpet pad and into the subfloor. Homeowners don’t care, I mean usually they are having new carpet installed anyways. Unfortunately for me, knife marks don’t sand out. =(

Stains: Not everyone will run into this problem. My buddy found hardwood floors under his carpet, and we didn’t find one single stain in his home. My house, on the other hand, was covered with dried water and pet stains. A lot of times they will disappear during the sanding process, in my case they stayed put. I had about two options if I wanted to continue refinishing my floor. The first would be to ignor the stains and finish the floor. I tested an area of the floor with some “sealer” to see how it looked…It looked horrible. So instead, I decided to stain our floor a very dark (walnut) color. This did help the stains blend in with the rest of the floor, but they are still there.

Flakers: A “flaker” is term that we used for hardwood boards that would “flake” up. You find them everywhere, in new floors as well as old. In new hardwood floors, the best way around them is prevention (or to throw them away before they are installed). In an old floor, you have to either replace the entire board with a new one (which I don’t recommend), or cut the flakes out with a knife, and patch the board with wood patch ( NOT wood “puddy”).

Those listed above were pretty much the only major issues that I ran into. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy that we refinished our floors, I’m just letting you know that there is more to it than most people think. There is a reason that a lot of home sellers are listing their homes as “hardwood floor under carpet.” It’s a lot of freaking work to refinish it!

Jeff