Hi! I just wanted to let everyone know how our floors turned out . . .

The owner of the flooring company finally came out to look at the floors and pronounced them unacceptable. He proposed sanding back down to the bare wood and starting over - which is what we'd hoped he would suggest. The plan was to sand the floors at an angle and then follow with a multi-head machine in order to remove the chatter marks. They also wanted to water-pop the floors prior to staining in order to achieve a richer, deeper color and then re-apply 3 coats of satin Bona Woodline poly.

And the results were . . . GREAT!

The chatter marks are still slightly noticeable (at least to us) but are not objectionable. The stain color is beautiful - we used 2 parts Dark Walnut to 1 part Red Oak - since the previous mix of 50-50 Provincial/Dark Walnut had produced a pale, cool color on our white oak. It's a much warmer, richer color now and we love it!

For the poly application, we used our programmable thermostat to do the following:

Warm the house to 74 degrees 1 hour prior to application
Turn the air OFF as application began
Turn the air back on at 68 degrees 4 hours after application

They also took the poly home with them at night and took it inside to keep it warm.

I have no idea which, if any, of these modifications worked to resolve the problem but we ended up with a streak-free floor and we're happy!

We did have one problem though, that I want to mention as a warning . . .

Around 1:30am after the 1st day of sanding, we received a call from our next door neighbor saying that a large black bag in front of our house was on fire. The bag (containing sawdust) was sitting at the base of our front steps (and in front of her car) and apparently had started to burn spontaneously. She was about to call 911 because her house was full of smoke but her son (whom she'd also called) arrived just in time to keep her from doing so. It took us about an hour outside in freezing temperatures and snow to get a hose hooked up, break open the bag, spread out the sawdust and wet it down until it stopped burning/smoking. Both homes and everyone's clothes smelled strongly of smoke and everyone had to shower before going back to bed. The next day (also in the snow), it took another hour or so to shovel up all the debris from the night before and bag it up so it could be thrown away. Not fun!

Apparently, because the poly on the floors had been recently applied, it reacted with the sawdust and spontaneously combusted. We'd heard of this happening with stain-soaked rags but were unaware that it could happen in this manner. Very thankful the bag wasn't left in our house or garage!

Anyway, there's a happy ending to our story and we're so very glad we decided to allow them the extra time to make the floors right!