Adding Some Shine Back Into Our Dining Room

The dining room is currently the only room with (exposed) hardwoods in the whole house. It reminds me how much I took the hardwoods at the apartment for granted. John and I have been re-introduced to the nasty static that builds up when your air is dry and you have 90% carpeted floors. Our furnace has no humidifier on it (our HVAC, while it works, is a veritable Pandora's box of nonsense), so the air is even drier than it would be anyway.

That's my long way of saying...well, I don't know. The carpet is nice, but we do plan to rip it up and hope the hardwoods underneath are in good enough condition to simply refinish. As for what we currently have exposed, the dining room floor was in ROUGH condition. The family we bought from has 2 kids and a big dog--the windowsill in the dining room is pretty much destroyed cuz I assume that's where the dog waited for his humans. Likewise, the path across the dining room between the living room and kitchen is all nicked, scratched, and diveted pretty badly. I knew short of sanding and totally refinishing it, there was little we could do to remedy that. But perhaps the largest problem with the whole floor surface was that it looked totally dried out and just sad.  Like, I could feel it frowning at me.

So after reading this post on Young House Love about using a liquid swipe-on product, I decided to give it a go. While they went with a high-gloss finish, I thought a super-shiny floor would look jarringly out of place amidst the carpet, linoleum, and decidedly more aged look of our little cottage versus the more modern feel of the YHL house. So I picked up a bottle of satin-finish Rejuvenate, the little mop-brush thing, and we settled in this morning to spruce the planks.

I was too excited to get to it, and forgot to take before pics. I'll say it's not a difference where you'd be all, "Wow, did you just get brand new hardwoods?!" but it's enough for us to notice, and you can definitely now see a sheen on the surface that was sorely lacking before. Here are a few pics of the finished product:

This is the most beautiful part of the floor. Unfortunately, it's where our table goes, so we use a carpet to keep the chairs and all from scratching the planks. Sigh. At least I can look back on this photo and see how lovely it is...

This is a view of the most damaged part of the floor--you can see it's very beaten up. But even so, the boards look moisturized and happy now, and have a pretty satin sheen.

This view shows how some of the planks have rather deep divets and chunks removed--take a look at the two areas that look almost sunken lower than the rest of the floor. But like above, at least they look healthy and quenched.

I'll say I did two things wrong, again due to  my impatience. So we'll see if it really makes a difference down the line, but I realized later that I was supposed to wait two hours between coats (I applied two coats total), and I only waited one. I misread the label where it says you can walk on it after one hour, so I assumed that meant you could throw down a second coat of the stuff at that time, too. Also, I realized with horror we were supposed to wait a full 24 hours after the final coat to re-load furniture in the room, but since that was not a feasible thing for us to do, we loaded in the furniture again after only like 4 hours. Since the surface of the wood was totally dry after that time, and it doesn't leave any sort of film, oily surface, or other distinctive marker that it's even there (thus we let Hammy out of the guest room and didn't worry about him walking on the floor), I figured we would be okay to put the carpet and furniture back and just take extra care for the rest of the day when traipsing across the floor and especially the carpet.

For now, I find I keep staring  at it in the changing afternoon light--I'll crouch down and look across the surface and just enjoy its slight reflection. It's not perfect, but it's certainly an improvement, and I'm definitely happy with it. I'll let you know if my impatience has any doomsday rammifications.