How to Sand Your Wood Floor

A nice aspect of wood floors is the fact that they can be sanded and refinished and look brand new. Professionals can do this but it is very easy to do it yourself. Sanding a wood floor takes come patience and it is better to follow a few steps to make the floor look great. Here are a few steps too how to sand a floor yourself.

• You have the option to sand the floor entirely by hand but it is quicker and easier to sand a floor using a sanding machine. You can either purchase or rent a sanding machine at various hardware stores. It makes for better results if a drum-sanding machine is used. There are disc-sanding machines but if not done very carefully the discs can make circular marks on the wood floor.
• A drum sander is made to work in a straight line to work with the grain of the wood. The only drawback of a drum sander is that it can't get to tight places and work around certain objects. If possible move all the objects into another room before starting. In the areas where the drum sander cannot reach either use a small power sander or sand the areas by hand.
• Make sure to buy very course or medium grade sandpaper. When you make the first pass with the sanding machine try to get as much as the old finish off the floor. When sanding a wood floor, and most other things, use the heavier grain sandpaper first then use the finer grade sandpaper in order to get a smooth finish at the end so it can then be covered.
• Before you start sanding look around on the floor to see if there is anything that much be removed such as nail heads. If there are objects such as these it will tear up the sandpaper so remove objects and make sure all nails are flush with the floor.
• With every pass of the room go back and use a small sander or sand by hand the places you could not reach with the sanding machine. This will make the same finish all around the room. Depending on the floor typically two or three passes is good in order to get a good finish but it may take more if the floor is very rough or damaged.
• One option you can do is before sanding use a varnish remover to get off some of the old varnish. This is only an option as you can use the sanding machine to sand everything off.
• When you are done with the final pass using the finer grade sandpaper you should be able to see nothing on the floor but the beautiful grain. When you see this you are done and you can start to refinish your floor. But before refinishing give the dust, that comes when you take off the layers of wood or old varnish, some time to settle and give the floor a good sweep so that dust is not mixed with the dust.

Author: Jason Green