Refinishing the upstairs hardwoods

Ever since we refinished our stairs last year, the plan was to continue that sexy Espresso stain onto the upstairs hardwoods. We chose this week to work on this project, which is pretty bad timing as I just completed the Art Room and Dressing Room a couple months ago, and now all the trim and doors have to be repainted.  Story of my life!  We decided to refinish the hallways, master closet, art room and dressing room, leaving the three largest bedrooms to be done later on.  The first thing we did was take all of the stuff out of those rooms and pile it into the other bedrooms.  The mess is intense, but we're sleeping on a mattress in the living room, anyway.  It's like camping, only crappy.

The second task was to use painters plastic to wrap up all our vents, wall fixtures and doorways.  This took awhile, but is very necessary.  I covered all the walls in the art room because I didn't want that dust all over my flat-finish navy walls.  Don't ever choose ultra flat paint for dark walls, everything shows!

Doesn't the capiz light look...uh...interesting with the plastic? ha

And I got the frosted door I've always wanted, at least for a day...

Towels were shoved under the doorways to the remaining bedrooms.  When we were done with the large orbital sander, we opened the doors and removed the towels and plastic to sand the thresholds with the hand sander.  I recommend using an orbital because they are more forgiving than a drum sander.  See my full 'how-to' on refinishing floors here.  We had a couple helpers that allowed us to get everything sanded in about 6 hours!

The speed of their sanding was the only reason I approved a beer break.  Har har.   Thanks, Frank and JR!

It worked to our advantage that most of the poly was already rubbed off the floors.  The orbital sanding was quick, this photo was about 15 minutes into the sanding of this room, I almost didn't make it up there in time to snap a 'during' picture!

At the end of the day, it was looking like this:

And despite all our prep, our stairs still looked like this!

The stain saga is up next!