New House - Projects that never end!

So I bought a house last week. The process was a bit of a pain, more confusing than anything, but now it is done and the real fun has started. Like most home owners I decided to 'make it my own'. I decided to paint the rooms and rip out the carpet and show the hardwood. But like every project, it is not as easy as it seemed. I pulled the carpet only to find a billion staples, nails, tackboard that needed to be removed. I removed all of that and found that the hardwood wasn't as nice as I would have liked.

So project 2 begun: Project 'Refinish the floor'

So I rented a sander from home depot and started sanding it down. Word of advise to anyone refinishing floors, do not rent the vibrating square sander if you have a lot of deep sanding to do. It takes forever. I made 10-12 passes while changing 36 grit sandpaper over and over. Finally, I moved on to the hand sander with the help of a special friend.

Once the sanding was all done -- or err... mostly done we decided to apply stain. As you can see from the photo below, the staining process went pretty well.

Unfortunately, the stain wouldn't dry. So after 48 hours I gave up and put the polyurethane on over the tacky stain. I have yet to see if this ruined the floor or what. I will keep posting on the process of the floor... stay tuned!