Sanding The Floorboards

We picked up the sanders from the rental shop this morning. We had reserved a bug sander and a smaller one for around the edges. We are paying £40 for the weekend including the paper. The first photo is of the floor before we started, the middle was in good condition and had no coating. Around the edge had been varnished previously. 

First we had to make sure all the nails and staples were not sticking out. Nathan did this with a punch. I had  ago but after making a hole in the floor decided to stop!

Below is a photo of the big sander.

This was the smaller sander, this turned out to be the harder one to use! Nathan started with the big one because I was a bit worried. I said I'd start with the small sander but after a few seconds of it moving around everywhere I decided to stop. The big sander just moved forwards but as the little one spun it was harder to control. 

The varnish on the edge was hard to remove and was melting on the sandpaper and we had to keep stopping and removing it. 

We started by going with the grain and using the medium grit sandpaper. As this was quite hard we eventually changed to using the tougher sandpaper and going against the grain. We then went over this with the medium sandpaper. The man in the shop also said some people do it diagonally.

The paper got shredded once as it wasn't on tight enought and went flying all round the room. Nathan was using the machine at the time and thought it had exploded!

Below is a photo after using the small sander with the toughest grit sander to go over it once. Getting the varnish off was definable the hardest part. We had to keep taking the sandpaper off and peeling off the varnish that had melted and set on the paper.

We got as close as we could to the edges then finished the very corners with sandpaper on a block by hand.

At the end if the day we have made good progress but not quite finished. We still have some of the edges to finished and once this is done we need to go over it all with the finer grit sandpaper. We're really happy with how it is turning out!

We've pulled up the carpet in the other bedroom. We weren't going to decorate this room yet but we thought while we have the sander for the weekend we might be able to get started on it tomorrow.