The #1 question we receive is about refinishing hardwood floors. I hope this helps answer your questions.

The two biggest challenges when refinishing Southern California Hardwood Flooring are where do you put the furniture and choosing a color.

If the house is empty, great but most of the time that’s not the case. Any area of hardwood flooring you wish to have refinished must be clear.
 

I’m no help at choosing the color. I’ve been refinishing Hardwood Flooring in Southern California since 1984 and I’ve done every color you can think of and at the end of the day, I like them all. You can look at pictures online and you can see stain samples at Home Depot but when refinishing your hardwood floors, you need to have the sample colors applied on your floor and with at least one coat of clear finish.

Now to the real work. 

Once the hardwood floor is clean and clear, no furniture and all the carpet, pad, tack-strip, staples, and nails have been removed we can get started.

We still hang plastic. Our machines all have vacuums and other companies will tell you its “dust-free” but that’s not true. To us old guys it seems like its dust-free because before the vacuum systems the house would be covered in dust. Now we are able to collect about 80% - 90% of the dust. But when you are refinishing Hardwood Flooring in Southern California you will have dust.

We sand the floor with 7 or 8 grades of different sandpaper. It sounds like a lot but we are sanding off the wood a paper-layer at a time. You don’t want to sand off more wood flooring than you have to but you must sand out all of the imperfections.

We fill the nail holes, gaps and cracks in between each sand paper. At one point we will have every crack and gap filled but it’s impossible to stay that way. Between the old floors moving, the vibration of the sanding and the vacuums a few small cracks may reappear. We try and fill those in between the clear coats of polyurethane. Your Southern California Hardwood Flooring will grow and shrink throughout the year so you will always have gaps somewhere.     

We sand the hardwood floor so that it is tabletop smooth, we then apply 4 coats of a clear polyurethane. We do a light sanding in between each coat of finish.
 

If you prefer to have the floor stained (any color) once we have the hardwood floor table top smooth, we then wash the floor with denatured alcohol mixed with water. That opens the grain of the hardwood floor so that the stain can penetrate and gives the floor a deep rich even color. We let that dry, we then stain the hardwood floor. We stain the floor in the direction of the grain. We stain about a 2-foot section at a time working from one side of the room to the other. We let the stain set for a minute or two before wiping it off. It’s still done on our hands and knees ( no machine for this yet ) once the stain has dried we then start applying the 4 coats of clear polyurethane.