The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed we did this before adding the baseboards, but I was on a baseboard kick and got that post prepped first.

After we removed the built-in bookcases in the dining room we uncovered patches of floor that were a completely different finish from the rest of the floor.

Whomp whomp.

I didn’t really want to refinish the entire floor at this point, nor did I want to invest in heavy equipment rental since we just had 2 small patches we needed to blend in.  I decided to try stripping the old finish off with just my little palm sander and if it was too difficult or if I royally effed it up then I was really only back where I started.

Since a palm sander really isn’t designed for stripping floors this was a little bit of a pain, but Matt turned out to be a sanding champ!  I left him to the sanding while I worked on painting our baseboards and after a few evenings (and about 10 replacement pads for the sander) we were down to this:

What’s even more remarkable is that the patch with the darker stain had some kind of ancient adhesive built up around the edges and Matt was able to get that all off.

Now that we were down to bare wood I had to find a stain.  I took a picture of the rest of the floor, compared it to the actual floor to make sure it was a pretty good photo match and off we went to the hardware store.  When choosing a stain color you want to be looking at actual wood samples rather than the picture on the can, and most hardware stores I’ve been to have these. After quite a bit of of waffling we decided on Minwax Cherry.  Not the color I would have expected based on the name or the can, but you know what? It was actually pretty darn close.

Because, as we’ve already established, I am fairly neurotic, I went back out to buy a slightly more yellowy stain to do a second coat with and decided on Minwax Golden Oak.

It’s not a perfect solution, but I didn’t expect to get a seamless match unless we redid the entire floor which is more time, effort and money then we want to add to this project at the moment.  Most of this section will also be covered by a buffet so I think by the time we’re done here it won’t even be noticeable unless you specifically point it out to someone.

I’ll call this one a win.