Refinish Engineered Hardwood Flooring
Engineered hardwood looks like a regular hardwood floor, but the internal structure of the planks is different. It's essentially a finished wood veneer on top of plywood and other materials. This makes the floor tougher than a regular single-wood floor, but also complicates things if you want to refinish it, since you could accidentally sand through the veneer and hit plywood. This plan calls for using sandpaper that's finer than you would normally use for the initial sanding, using a pad sander instead of the more powerful rotating floor sander, and doing part of the sanding with a hand-held vibrating sander to make sure you don't go too far. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
1. Remove all floor trim from the room. Go over the floor with you hammer and hammer down any nail heads or other obstructions.
2. Load an orbital floor sander with rectangular sanding pad with 60-grit sandpaper. You can rent orbital sanders from tool rental and home improvement stores. Starting in a corner of the room, slowly move the sander across the floor in short, steady strokes, with the direction of the floorboards. Reload the sander with fresh sandpaper as necessary. Sand until all the shine and most of the color is gone from the floor and you've started to see bare wood. There will still be spots and streaks of stained areas on the floor.
3. Load your hand sander with 60-grit sandpaper. Go back over the areas of the floor where there is still stain darkening the wood, and sand just until it's down to bare wood. Clean the floor of all dust.
4. Put on rubber gloves and open the can of stain. Starting at a wall and working in sections, brush the stain onto the floorboards with the direction of the grain. Let it soak into the wood for one to two minutes, then wipe it up with paper towels. Let the floor dry for 24 hours.
5. Open and gently stir the floor gloss. Brush it on gently, so bubbles don't form in the gloss. Go with the direction of the floorboards. Allow it to dry for 24 hours.
6. Fold a piece of 220-grit sandpaper into thirds and, with your hand, buff the entire floor, just enough so the coat of gloss looks dull and milky. Clean the floor of dust. Re-apply a second coat of gloss in the same way as the first. Repeat the whole process one more time for a third coat.
Tags: sander with, with direction, 60-grit sandpaper, areas floor, bare wood