How To Sand Stain Finish Oak Floor - Early American Stain - Ask Questions & Leave Comments (Ep#2)

This video will show you how your floor can go from looking like this to this just watch this video and we'll show you how to do it. So this area shows a good example of how the sun can bleach the wood because right here over the years with the sun beating over here you can see how this area has been lightened when deciding where you want to start the sanding I find it best to start at a point where the crossover is going to be furthest away from the visible eye entering the floor and also keeps it consistent for us when we're going to remove these marks. Okay so Jon has now finished the 36 and he started into the 60 grit So before we start scraping we've got to make sure the scraper is nice and sharp and just standard scraper like this so the idea with the scraper is you want to have the angle on that scraper..you can see that you have to go, there's only one way you can sharpen these scrapers The flat, onto the flat..move it away from you..something like this..should have a solid base should only take a few strokes normally you can Makita all that but we're going to scrape this off so in situations like this where we have this uh pre-finish here that's not coming off easily with the scraper you can hit it with the Makita that's going to scuff it up quite well and it's going to make it a lot easier to scrape this down and then go back over with Makita. with this pre-finish you can actually go against the grain just to score that..just to finish off as you can see so a quick point i'd like to make with the uh when you're using the orbital sander its integral that you move in the direction of the grain which is this way if you go this way you're going to put these massive scratches on the floor i'm going to demonstrate to you what you don't want to do.... you don't want to do this that's what you don't want to do you put these lines here..okay obviously you want to go this way by going this way we take all the edger marks off and the scraper marks too so oftentimes when you're sanding you're gonna find that there are sometimes deep crevices or marks on the floor that are too deep to sand out.. and rather than putting some kind of pit or scraping too deeply where you put a a visual dip in the floor it's better to just fill it and it's only certain times when I use this type of filler but I find it's very effective for small holes like if you had a cable hole up to say three quarter uh for maintaining it and that's this product here I just find this product works really well for as I said a hole or a small imperfection like this one over here so or you have a situation like this we don't want to sand out this and put a big crevice here because it won't look good we're just going to apply that filler and it's going to hold in there really good underneath the urethane now I've applied it now of course I'm going to let this dry I'm going to sand it and then wipe it but it just blends in so beautifully it takes a nice pigment of the stain and then we're ready to move on after that to the urethane as a contractor it's invaluable to me and i use it very often without you know having to cut out the wood and put another plank in because sometimes that's not really an option so this comes in handy for that and it hardens very very quickly and it's very hard it's not like a latex filler which is kind of kind of cracks out really easy this is more hardens up really well it's oil based so once you apply it and it's hardened it's it's pretty well there to stay because you're going to be covering it with you know your stain but then you're going to be putting your thing on top as well right so I can't stress the importance of having a clean floor before you begin your staining process and if you're not staining your beginning the urethane process so I know it's obvious but you really want to have a clean pristine floor before you begin so spend a great deal of time vacuuming vacuuming the uh the sills vacuuming the tops of the baseboard and where you know vacuumed between the cracks and it's all just gonna it's all obvious reasons you don't want any of that material in your final product so when you find your staining you want a pristine clean floor so I'm spending a great deal of time vacuuming then I'm going to tack the floor and then we'll be ready to stain so once I'm finished vacuuming thoroughly I then take this Bennett tack cloth and I tack the entire floor with it so this is used to get the residual dust or film that's remaining on the floor surface even after you vacuum because there'll always be that residual film so even you notice here when I just wipe my hand on here you look at that film so that's not coming off so that's why this tack cloth is great for doing that just to take that residual film again the cleaner your floor is uh the better it is for your stain absorption right so you don't want to you want to get it as as clean as you can and I find that with this tack cloth I can I can rotate it around four times on on the applicator and then discard it so I'll just cover with you how I put the top off into my applicator hole this is just a Richard applicator holder clamp style are great you just put it in there clamp it down go to the other side you may have another method you're not going to want to get on your hands and knees and do this I suppose you could but that's going to be awfully back breaking and I don't recommend that at all so when you put it in this applicator holder and they're so quick to put in you just clamp it up like that then you clamp it down and then you're ready to go okay so I rigged up my applicator onto the uh pole sander here and you'll notice it's nice and pristine clean now okay you see that it's beautiful I'm just going to start at the far wall just move it across the floor nice and slowly so I usually will check it again the more time you spend vacuuming the cleaner your floor will be to start with so i'll normally check this after about 60 70 square feet because it will clog up obviously the tack cloth's going to uh it's going to be getting all the dust that's on that floor there so it will clog and then what you're going to do is you're going to adjust it so now you see it's it's clogged now and that was about probably about 60 70 square feet so you can see it's clogged here but at that point i just take it out of the applicator holder you could run this over to the vacuum but uh you don't want to use that same surface and then what you'll do is you can flip it over and then use the clean side again so and there's a bit of a clean side down there so I usually flip this four times to just maximize the use out of it and then you pitch it in the garbage so to give you an idea of what we're talking about here you can see what the tack cloth now looks like and that's just going one application my floor is that much cleaner now i'm going to redo the same process again with a second tack cloth it's well worth doing it it just makes your floor a lot cleaner for when you go to stain it if you like the way i do my floors all the products that i use are listed in the info section below so just check there for what you need this job we're using the Early American wood stain by Varathane as with all stains oil based stains you want to slowly stir it to bring all the pigment up from the bottom of the can you see how it just sits there so as this sits in the shelf uh at your local retailer you will see that the pigment settles right to the bottom of the can now in this particular brand or this particular tint of Early American isn't too bad because it's not really one of the darker stains but when you get into the heavily pigmented stains like dark walnut ebony or jacobean they will have a lot of the pigment settled to the bottom and it settles like mud there so you really have to be sure that you stir it up very thoroughly and bring it all into the liquid so after stirring it for quite a while and you can feel there's no pigment on the bottom then it's ready to use you also have to stir it in the pan if it's sitting for quite a period of time so when I'm staining I like to saturate my applicator it's just a standard Varathane 10 inch synthetic applicator and what I do is I saturate the floor so you can see I've applied the stain here now and I'm going to remove it with this remove it with a sponge mop I'm going to show you what it looks like after I do that so after you've applied the stain you then take the sponge mop and remove the excess and it looks beautiful on the ends of the planks what I do is I just take this rag and you wipe it off and you just blend it all and make it make it look right make it look blended that it looks normal and then when that dries in that's going to look beautiful there's no marks you can't see any edger lines any any marks like that so that worked out really well now there is one thing I'd like to note about this sponge mop I don't use it perfectly clean I actually saturate it in the stain and wring it out so the reason you don't want it totally clean if it's a brand new sponge mop and you go to wipe it off you'll actually remove too much of the stain so you'll make it too clean and then later on into the into the staining process what's going to happen is it's going to get darker because your applicator and your sponge mop are going to begin to get really saturated so it's going to look darker so one thing you want to do when you're staining in your when you're removing with the sponge mop so as I said previously you can do a total of six so you can do one two three we'll cover the applicator will cover these three and then the next three so what I'll do is I'll do two entire widths of the applicator to get six and then when I remove it I will uh you know remove the same amount now there's one thing you'd want to do as well when you're removing the stain I'll actually go back to the seventh plank like so the three then the seven and start removing and always stay on the seam of the of the planks when you're removing because if you if you go halfway through a plank you'll actually sometimes see a line difference from the applicator so try to stay against your plank where the seams are and um and you'll find you get a better result that way okay so it's starting to look good now shaping up just applying the stain and I'll give you an overall look when I'm done okay so I'm back on the job site here the following day and some yahoo decided it was a good idea to walk on the floor so I just thought I'd point out how to correct this problem so there was a big footprint here, and over here right by the door I guess someone came in and so now what we got to do is we're going to correct that you correct that by taking a piece of 100 grit paper where you see a footprint we're going to blend it we're going to sand it this is this is an after stain job here we're going to see because you got to get that footprint out it looks ridiculous it's not the end of the world I'm actually going to sand it out these are the kind of things you have to deal with from time to time so that's the first step so the next step is to take our trusty tack cloth so you want to wipe off this area with the tack cloth just remove all that that dust we just sanded right now another thing you can do if you didn't have a tack cloth handy and what I'll do sometimes actually take tape you just roll a piece of tape like this and go over the entire area that was walked on where you sanded there's now I did already clean this with the tack cloth but never hurts to do this anyway if you didn't have a tack cloth you can even just get a clean clean rag to get the majority of it or if you could I don't really like to run the vacuum cleaner onto the stained floor because it tends to put these wheel marks and unless you're going to carry the vacuum on or you have a carry-on vacuum you don't want to be doing that so if you can extend your vacuum to to vacuum it up that's great sometimes you can if it's just a small area you don't really have to get all involved with the vacuum cleaner but that's how you get it ready so now we can restain those little spots there just to make them normal I'll show you how we do that you just take your brush with the stain on it now here's where being Pablo Picasso comes in handy you're actually using your your vision just to blend this in so now we had to apply stain wherever we took it off we have to reapply some stain right uh I know what you're thinking that this does not look right and no it doesn't but we're not done so you just put some stain on there right on those spots where the footprints are sanded out then I'm going to take our clean rag I'm going to blend this in hmm that's how you correct the boo-boos now it looks still wet but the color what we're looking for is the color to be completely blended right it looks shiny because it's still wet but that blends in quite nicely and now we've corrected the booboo no more footprints so here's an overall look of the room now this is the following day it's dried in it's all ready to go it's nice and dry ready for the first coat of urethane if you'd like to finish your floor the way I did in this video I've provided links to everything you'll need in the description below so this job again we're using the Fabulon satin urethane and these come in quart cans only so obviously what you want to do is prepare all the urethane ahead of time so if you're using quart cans then you want to make sure you have enough pre-prepared before you start urethaning so you're not doing this while you're doing it if you have the gallon or the big uh you know the the five gallon or the the gallon drums it's it's not a big as big a deal but anyway just have it already so when you're working with this urethane we want to make sure we stir it really well and I want to shake it You stir it just to get all that white the white satin mixed into the clear because these urethanes the satin urethane is actually a mixture you have the clear and then you have the the satin pigment that has to be brought in and mixed with the clear and you'll know with the gloss fabulon it's it's almost like motor oil or honey it's just just a golden color and there's no pigment in it whatsoever the semi-gloss is fifty percent I'd say seventy percent of my customers want satin so it seems to be very popular so that's what you just keep stirring it up until all that satin is mixed right in and it looks nice and creamy okay so we're applying our first coat what I like to do is I like to put a rolled up piece of tape on my wrist and have another rolled up piece of tape here just as you're going along you can grab any pieces of dust or hair that you see always so what I like to do I've applied two widths of the roller here because one roller width will do three planks so you can see the six are done but I like to go back when I after I've applied the two widths I'll go back to this so there's an overlap where the where the two where the overlap is the seam I'll go back over this with my roller against here and I'll just run it along that line and then I'll move forward I've applied the two i'm going to go back one plank it's going to do the overlap and i'm ready to move and advance forward [Music] i want to show you a trick for removing hairs you see there's a hair there i another piece of a hair or something take the edge of your brush like this poke into it and you lift it out go back over with the roller and it's gone we always have to plan our exits when we're putting your thing on you'll find yourself backing out an awful lot of time [Music] so the first coat is dry you can see it's looking quite nice so we're going to screen sand this now vacuum and then do the next coat so oftentimes we'll run into a situation like here underneath the bull nosing here you can see where i've missed some of the stain right so that's easily corrected you take your minwax touch-up stain pen i'll just go under here like so just go under here like so [Music] but you don't get it on the carpet and now all the stain is applied under there the next step we're going to take this screens 180 grit screen put it into our richard applicator holder [Music] these are great things to have these applicator holders [Music] so the modification they put on it put the quick release snap on it just makes it so much easier to use so now i'm going to take my 180 grit i'm going to take my 180 grit and screen sand the entire floor so what we're looking to achieve here is that we lightly sand the floor with this we don't have to put an excessive amount of force on the on the applicator uh because we're just trying to scuff off the um the raised grain after you put that first coat of urethane on it tends to raise the grain especially in the really high grained areas um it'll it'll bring it up it kind of lifts it so it gives it a little coarseness a little a little stubble right so we want to just knock that down so it's smooth as glass and then we can then vacuum and tack it for our next coat so after screen sanding you should have a a white powdery film all over the floor like this and that's completely normal so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to vacuum then i'm going to attack the floor before i begin the next coat okay i can't stress the importance of a good thorough vacuuming before you tack the floor i'm just going to demonstrate what i go through i actually go through all the planks and i even go through the cracks between the planks the process of cleaning between the cracks with the with the vacuum i actually do after i vacuum the entire floor again we just we just want to uh get the floor as clean as possible before we um we're going to wipe the floor after this and we just want it as clean as possible for the next coat so you might spend another 10 minutes but it's definitely worth it and it's going to save you a lot of uh aggravation because things always pop up you've got little hairs you've got little particles of things that just seem to drift from who knows where so it's always just good to be really clean on the floor before we get going on the next thing once you've finished vacuuming prepare some rags that will be used on this applicator to wipe the floor with you'll note while i have vacuumed the floor there's still a film on there you could argue that the film itself is the urethane in the powder form so it's going to blend in with the fabulon which is what it does but i still like to wipe it off and i like to be pristine clean i'll do this floor twice and uh i just find it's it's better to clean it off you might as well just clean it off even though the vacuum didn't pick all that up so i've saturated that rag and i've just rung it out so it's not completely you know dripping and you just go across the floor like this it's very simple procedure very simple procedure but it's you know and it only takes a few minutes you know to do a couple hundred square foot room i could do this twice in about 15 minutes so it's not a big deal and it really makes a big difference in removing and removing that residual film so here's the result of uh what wiping the floor looks like after about doing a hundred square feet so you can really see where it's building up here so at the job now the second coat has been applied let's take a look around here i'll be going through the same process i did yesterday screen sanding vacuuming tacking and then applying the final coat of urethane if you found this video helpful please hit like and subscribe to the channel and stay tuned for more upcoming videos on how to sand stain and finish your hardwood floors

Channel: Hardwood Floor Refinishing 101

Views: 88,896

Keywords: sanding oak floor, sanding hardwood floors, staining oak floor, finishing oak floors, staining hardwood floors, clarke ez8 floor sander, clarke super 7 edger, clarke obs 18

Id: _2olmwScTY4

Length: 33min 11sec (1991 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 22 2020