So, I haven't blogged for awhile but there is a reason. The reason is our living room floor. When we last left you we were excited to begin sanding, staining and varnishing our living room floor so that the entry way into our house would be done. Well we spent a weekend sanding the old floor down to the bare wood. We had to rent two different sanders as well as an edge sander. Then we had to use a hand sander to take out any gouge marks from the edge sander (which we called "the destructor"). In short we did a lot of sanding. Then we were ready to stain. We went over and over which stain to use to match, or at least come close to, our stair treads. We tried plain stains, we tried mixing some stains. We tried everything and finally found one that we thought looked good. So then we stained. We did it in the evening, when the kids were in bed, so that it could try and air out over night. And this is what it looked like:
We went to bed that night thinking that it looked good and we were happy.
But then the next day, in the light of day, we realized that the stain looked purple! Ugh! We don't know what went wrong. Did we mix the wrong ones? Did they have a reaction? We didn't know but we weren't happy with it. So we tried putting some stains over a sample piece that we had but that didn't look right. It just looked muddy. So we gave in and we sanded the entire floor again! Then we carefully tried another set of stains to see if it would match and we stained in the light of day. The next color looked good but there were some spots where the stain wouldn't absorb so we sanded that off and applied more stain but the edges of those spots looked darker than the rest of the floor so we lightly sanded those. We were so tired of dealing with this that we considered just ripping up the whole floor and putting down prefinished. But we decided to stick with it. So finally we put down some poly last night and I think we're good (see top two pictures). Finally... 
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