This is our first time trying to refinish our floors with a sander. We wanted to do our living room and dining room. I had hand stripped both floors a few years ago after removing the wall to wall rugs and it didn’t turn out very well so we covered them with large area rugs until now.

We started by rolling up the rugs and moved the furniture out of the way and went to Lowes to rent the sander. The cost is $39 for 24 hours plus the sandpaper discs, $6 each pkg of 3, for the machine. The sander weighs about 120 lbs and comes apart into 2 pieces but one piece will still weight about 100 lbs and the other only about 20 lbs. I wouldn’t have been able to put it in the car or into the house by myself but my husband was able to handle it by himself.

The sander was available. We asked if there were any instructions and were told no. Just put the discs on the 3 pads under the sander. I told the worker that I had already stripped the floors so he recommended the 50 and 80 grits (2 each) and that should do the job but I bought 3 each. That was great!

Nothing goes as planned though. You can watch us as we sand our floors in Part 1 below. We picked up the machine in the early afternoon but were given until 9PM the following night to have it back. Way more time than we would need I was sure.