Second floor floors floors floors

We've really been chugging along on the second floor (hallway, small bedroom) and this weekend we tackled the floors. We'd been planning on painting all the pine flooring on the second floor white (as in the master bedroom), but since the walls are all white, we decided white floors would be overkill, verging on clinical. So, staining and varnishing it was.

Before refinishing. Old pine to the right, but we had to patch in some spots with new pine

Another spot where old pine meets new pine. There's a 3/4" step up right at the turn.

Now as usual, we'd planned on hiring out the refinishing, especially given warnings from Dan's brother Rudi, courtesy of his wife Melanie's dad who renovates houses professionally, that floors are really easy to mess up. So I got a floor refinisher recommendation from our neighbor, and it turns out he had used a guy who lives diagonally across the street from us. The refinisher came, looked around, did some measuring with his strides (he forgot his measuring tape and ours just broke), then quoted me 1200$. For labor alone. For roughly 250 sqft of flooring. Somebody tell me - are these normal prices that I'm getting quoted, or are tradesmen in this area just outrageously overpriced???

laundry area (across from shared bathroom) is all new pine

Anyway, after that craziness -- obviously -- we decided to do it ourselves. I'd been seeing commercials on hgtv that Sherwin Williams was having a 40% off sale on all paint and stains, so I hauled myself out to a store in West Lebanon and bought a gallon of polyurethane and two pints of fairly dark stain I thought Dan might like (he's been yammering on about dark floors), plus a poly applicator thingy you attach onto a rod, and some tack cloths. It all came out to roughly 50$. I'd been doing quite a bit of research on pine floor refinishing, and was leaning towards tung oil, specifically waterlox, but that all flew out the window in the face of a 40% off sale. Yeah, I'll take that 25$ gallon of polyurethane, (as opposed to ~40$/quart of waterlox ordered from a specialty store) thanks.

Saturday morning we set out to Home Depot to rent a drum sander. Dude at the tool rental place strongly recommended we use a buff sander though, since a drum sander would take off too much of pine flooring (cause its so soft). Unfortunately the one buff sander they still had was broken, but could be fixed in half an hour...which somehow resulted in us getting the buff sander 30min later for free...? Yay. He recommended we buy some 36 grit, 80 grit, and 220 grit sanding sheets and sent us on our way, just be sure to get it back on Sunday by closing time. Yay again for extra time beyond the standard 24 hour rental window, which allows us to get in a round of sanding after the first coat  of poly.
So we lugged that heavy machine home and Dan started sanding. And sanding and sanding (I did the edges of the room with the orbital sander). Turns out even with 36 grit sand paper, in order to get the floor to unfinished wood, we needed to go over it like 8 times with the 36 grit and then one time each for the 80 and 220. Phew. (Even then, it probably should've been sanded a few more times, but I just kept reminding us how beat up these floors were and how they were not gonna be perfect)

The small bedroom. Ew, those floors.

Took a break for sandwiches and a GINORMOUS whoopie pie. They're everywhere up in NH.

7 or so hours later, we were finally ready to clean up the floors (sweeping, vacuuming, then wiping with tack cloths) and then stain with minwax oil based wood stain in provincial.

eh, stripped enough

on my hands and knees wiping up dust

And Dan HATED it. I think his actual words were, "It looks like a f***ed up tiger. Pong says Mango looks like a f***ed up tiger".  He only cheered up when I told him if he really hated it we could always paint it white.
One problem that came up with the stain were these clusters of swirly marks on the parts of the floor patched with new pine. Dan figured that it was probably because we jumped from 80 to 220 grit with nothing in between and the 220 grit wasn't able to get our the sander gouges from the 80 grit and they showed up in the new pine because its softer than the old pine. He was really bummed about it so we went to bed, planning on resanding the swirly marks off in the morning.
Resanding took him a while on Sunday morning, but by noon ish we were able to get our first coat of poly down everywhere except for the stretch of hallway that had the swirlies (and had to be resanded, stained, and allowed to cure for a minimum of 6 hours).

f***ed up tiger? He has a point...

Poly-ing is a surprisingly quick (and sweaty) task, so we had the rest of the afternoon to work on editing Dan's paper. Around 6pm, we quickly sanded the first coat of poly with 220 grit and were able to return the buff sander an hour before closing. PHEW.
When we got home, we wiped down the floors again, showered, then put down another coat of poly this time over the whole hallway. And slept on the couch (the fumes, you see). Not a comfortable sleep AT ALL, let me tell you. Monday morning, with the orbital sander, I sanded down the poly on the swirly part of the hallway, wiped down, poly-ed again. Yes, three coats of poly, sand lightly between coats 1 and 2. Tuesday morning, I gave the whole hallway one last coat (so some parts ended up with 4 coats to Dan's delight).

poly makes a big difference

looking down the hall towards shared bath door

laundry area

looking back towards master bath

So that's it. They're not quite perfect, but between perfect-floors and slightly-imperfect-floors+1200$, I'll take the latter option any day.