[djmcmath]

When we bought our house, we discovered that the original hardwood floors -- about 900 sqft of them -- had been carpeted over. Bottom line up front: long painful hassle.

So we pulled the carpet, which had been put down with a lot of staples and some nails, every single one of which had to come up before we could start in on the sanding.

Sanding was a huge hassle. The polyurethane kept gumming up the sanding pads, so we were swapping out super-coarse pads every half hour or so, or just wasting time. We ended up using 4" belt sanders to take out a lot of the worst problems. The floor's got a lot of "character."

Once we got through the old polyurethane, it wasn't so bad: a day or so of walking slowly through the spaces behind the big floor sander, just smoothing things down. We had to use hand sanders to get into the corners and around the edges, too. Big hassle, hard on the knees.

Now, two years later, we look back at 6 weeks of nights and weekends of pain and suffering, and we say "That sucked, but it was worth it." If we had to do it again, I'm not sure we'd do it that way. I'd probably be inclined to pay someone $2/sqft to just take care of the problem, if I suspected they'd do a decent job of it.

Dan