Sand, stain and finish only the worn area of solid hardware floor OR redoing the entire room
Hi everyone,
I own a home with solid hardwood floors which I’ve previously sanded and finished with water-poly. A rental tenant has cracked the poly off of an area approximately 3×4 feet (he had a desk chair with small wheels but failed to put down a chair mat to protect the finish from the wheels).
My question is: can I simply sand, stain and re-poly the worn area ONLY? I think that I can if I also sand into the bordering area a few inches? Will that work? What are the pros and cons of that?
Or do I need to resand and re-poly the entire room? The room is 8′ wide at the area of damage but then widens to 11′ wide and is 50′ long.
This is my first time posting here. If I haven’t chosen the right forum for this topic, please point me in the right direction.
THANK YOU!
Andrew
Replies
Andrew
To make it disappear the easy answer sort of is yes to sanding the whole floor.
Sort of, because those wheels have possibly done more than just cracking up the finish. Depending the tonnage of the user, wood fibers could have been crushed a bit as well. Not so in the surrounding areas.
since it's a rental, orbital sand the bad area, tooth in and blend along whole boards with something easier to control like a multimaster sander with the triangular pad
or scrape those areas and hand sand to blend to the orbital.
staining will be tough, color match real tough.
but you could put down a small area rug and layout furnishings accordingly.
Best of luck.
I would carpet it. It is going to need completely stripped in my opinion, and the finish should never come loose like that, so a partial repair will likely fail in other areas and won't likely match.
Most people like carpet, moreso than the ones who like porly finished hardwood. A really nice professionally done hardwood floor is nice to most people though.
Great info! Thanks so much to both of you for your ideas and explanation. Makes a lot of sense. I'll do my best and see how it turns out and let you know - perhaps a follow-up pic. Thanks again!
hmmm
Odd how that's peeled. Maybe something evil got spilled there?
If it were mine I would no doubt try the fix that calvin suggested, only I'd leave out the worrying so much. If you proceed with care
you should come up with an acceptable fix as long as you don't expect perfection. If the floor still looks a bit worn when you're
done than that's because it is. If the floor does continue to peel some where else then you do have another issue but given the
info provided I'd not expect it. As for carpet I for one would rather have straw on the floor as you can sweep dirty straw up and
throw it away. Carpet? I can't get those images out of my head of decades ago when carpet would show up in bathrooms.
Ewww...
Personal taste though.