First question: can your floor take it
Refinishing removes wood. That is the whole process, so the floor has to have wood left to give.
Solid hardwood has a thick wear layer above the tongue and groove, and it will typically take several refinishes across its life. If your house is from the fifties or sixties and the floors are original, they may already have been done once or twice, and the answer depends on where the boards sit now relative to the nails.
Engineered hardwood is different. It has a real wood veneer over a plywood core, and once you sand through the veneer the floor is finished for good. A thick veneer will take a light pass. A thin one will not take any.
We check before we quote, at a floor vent or a doorway threshold where the board edge is visible. If your floor cannot take another sanding, we will say so, and we will talk about what else can be done.
What we do
We sand through a grit sequence, starting coarse enough to cut through the old finish and level the surface, then stepping finer until the floor is ready to take stain evenly. Skipping grits is how you get sanding marks that only appear after the finish goes on, when it is too late.
Edges and corners get done with an edger and by hand, because a drum sander cannot reach them. This is the slow part and it is where a rushed job shows.
Our sanders run dust containment. It is not a perfectly dust free process, but containment is the difference between wiping down a few surfaces afterward and finding sawdust in your cabinets months later.
Stain and finish
If you are changing color, we put sample patches down on your actual floor and let you look at them in your own light. Stain reads differently on white oak than on red oak, and differently again in morning light than under a lamp at night. A fan deck in a showroom cannot show you that.
For the finish itself, waterborne polyurethane cures fast, has far less odor, and stays clear rather than ambering over the years. Oil-based takes longer to cure and smells strongly while it does, but it is slightly more forgiving and it warms the wood tone, which some people specifically want. We will walk you through which one suits your house and your schedule.
Living with it
Plan on being out of those rooms for a few days. Light foot traffic in socks is usually fine at 24 hours. Furniture goes back at around 72 hours. Area rugs need to wait longer, closer to two weeks, because a rug traps solvent that is still coming out of a curing finish and it will leave a visible outline on the floor.
Where we work
Hardwood refinishing from Logan to Nephi, including Murray, Sandy, Midvale, Cottonwood Heights, Holladay, Millcreek, Taylorsville, West Jordan, South Jordan, Riverton, Draper, Lehi, American Fork, Bountiful, and Layton.