Both with the bathroom remodeling and the interior painting, the workers put down material to protect the wood floors and kept it in place with masking tape. But each time, when the work was done, and the floor protection was removed, the masking tape took off part of the polyurethane coating on the floors. While I went back and patched the problems, it was clear that the floors needed to be refinished. They have had no professional work done in the 40 years since the house was built.
Refinishing the floors involves sanding off the current finish and then applying a new finish. We want to do all the floors at the same time, so all the furniture on the wood floors needs to be moved off of the floors. The best way to do that is to call some movers to move out all the furniture, store it for a couple of weeks, and then move it back. The only rooms we are not emptying are the utility room, kitchen, and the 3 bathrooms -- they all have tile floors. But the dining room, living room, library, bedrooms, closets -- all of those rooms need to be emptied. Which means we have no beds, and no place to sleep.
Luckily, our (adult) children live in town and had planned a joint two week trip to New Zealand in the middle of October. So we arranged (a) to stay in our temporarily empty kids' places, (b) to have a moving company take everything away, store it, and bring it back two weeks later, during which (c) the floors are sanded, stained, and refinished
We found a long list of companies in town that would refinish our floors. We tried to contact Boatright, since they put the floor in when the house was built, but we just could not get them to respond. We had three other companies come out and quote the job, and decided to go with ATX Wood Flooring with an estimate of $10,950. They were able to schedule the work for October 11 to October 25.
Next we contracted with Square Cow Movers to move all our furniture out on October 10, and bring it all back on October 26. Their cost was based on time and distance, so the total cost would depend on how long it took for them to load up the truck (actually two trucks), plus the space in the warehouse to store everything for two weeks. It ended up costing $2500 to move out, $240 to store everything, and $2000 to move back in. Things went so well with the refinishing, we were able to reschedule the move back in to October 25.
Knowing that we needed to move everything out on October 10, we spent the weeks before that packing up. Books, CDs, DVDs, all had to be put in boxes. Furniture needed to be disassembled for moving. Clothes, bedding, pillows needed boxes. We got boxes from Lowes, Home Depot, and 1/2 Price Boxes. $169.55 for boxes. Mostly small book boxes, but also 5 wardrobe boxes for the hanging clothes from the closet and a few large boxes for pillows and other bedding.
Finally, on October 10, the movers showed up and took all the boxes and furniture away.
With the house empty
Dylan moved his equipment in and started sanding the floors.
After sanding, the floors would stained and sealed, and then two coats of finish put on them. The finish is Bona Traffic GO Waterborne Wood Floor Finish.
After all the work was done, the floor needed to cure for 3 days.
On October 25, the movers brought everything back and in a little over a week later, we had things mostly back in place.
As a side effect of having the floors refinished, we cleaned everything we could think of -- dust, vacuum, ... -- including changing all the filters for the air cleaners and A/C system.
