Discovering Wood Floors

I got the office painted my neutral off white color that the rest of the house has been painted so far. My poor children thought I had gone round the bend, since we usually paint every room in our house a different bright color. I had to have something neutral in this house though for the time being to cover that SALMON color. I do not know how this house will feel in the long winter months here. Winter is 6 months of snow here. Lots of snow. We will probably repaint after I get a feeling for how it feels to live here in all seasons.

After the walls were done I skipped the ceiling (I may regret that later) and went straight after the laminate covering the wood floors.


I could not believe how incredibly dirty these were! The drywall mud and paint I can kinda of understand but what the heck is that dirt layer?

I read this article last week about how to clean wood dressers and I thought the same thing would work on my wood floors.


I was impressed with the results. I did use some Lemon Oil for the last step for this area but quickly rethought my process.


I wondered if I shouldn't opt to put a layer of water based poly finish on it after it is all clean up to protect it until the future floor sanding process. That is many years down the road. So I opted to skip the Lemon Oil on the rest of the floor.

Here's what I did:


Using my scrub brush and a bucket of water with Murphy's Oil Soap I scrubbed and scrubbed the floor.


This area seems to have been painted with drywall mud, really??? I had to get my mud knife out and scrape the mud off. It worked better to scrub the floor first and get it wet, then it came right off.



After it was mostly cleaned up I dried the floor. You don't want the floor to be wet to long. I then went over the floor with 0000 steel wool going with the grain of the wood. This not only cleaned the stuff left behind but buffed out the floor also. I should have used 00 steel wool since the floors were so badly damaged but I only had 0000 handy. I then wiped up the floor again.


We have the finished product. It looks great and I can work around the furniture in the room doing small sections at a time. It will take lots of time however but virtually free since I already had all the supplies. And believe me, old wood floors with marks, and scratches beat laminate any day!