Refinishing 100 Year Old Floors Using ONLY Oil
Step Two:
Once you’ve used your 20 grit sandpaper on the edger, use a 20 grit sandpaper in the drum sander and sand the entire center of the room that has not been sanded with your edge sander. DO NOT stop moving with this machine, it will literally eat your floor leaving massive gouge marks. It is easy to move the machine up and down to stop if you need to so don’t be intimidated. Just don’t stop moving while the sandpaper is touching the floor, and make sure to move with the direction of the wood.
Once you’ve finished sanding your room with the drum sander, go back to your edge sander and use your 36 grit. Keep alternating between the machines and grits, until you’ve reached your highest grit and your floor feels smooth to the touch! The entire sanding process probably took us about 4.5 hours for this one room.
Step Three:
Before you use your oil, make sure you floors are completely vacuumed and cleaned off so you are not sealing in any dirt or dust.
I picked up a can of Watco Pure Tung Oil and did much research on how to use this. There’s not very many people who have sealed wood floors with this so we were taking a chance!
We used gloves and clean cotton cloths to apply this oil over the entire surface of the wood. In my blog post I go into detail explaining the differences between oil and stain/polyurethane. A big difference is it soaks into the wood actually hardening it instead of sitting on top of the wood as poly and stain would.
You can see the difference in the above picture between the part of the floor that had one coat of oil just applied, and part of the floor that has been sanded and is unfinished.
You can immediately walk on the oil with clean cotton socks! As you can see here, we had half of the floor oiled. The oil will also soak into the floor within a days time and after about 30 days will lighten to almost the color of the unfinished floor, which is really what I wanted to enhance!
The next day, our floors looked like this. This was with one coat of tung oil. I applied a second coat the next day using the same technique, and just after an hour or two, used a clean cotton cloth to wipe off any extra oil left on the surface!
This photo was taken after two coats of tung oil! Do you see how it really made the wood tones rich, yet there is absolutely NO stain on these floors!
Probably the best part of using oil, you can touch up spots as you want! Unlike polyurethane, where you have to strip the entire finish to touch up, you can touch up any spots that need it in less than a minute!
I linked all the products used on my blog as well as a few extra process photos. Head here to see them!