Refinishing Our Floors--Keeping it Real

We refinished our floors in our previous home with no real problems, and people were always complimentary of them.  I loved the dark color against our stone colored painted walls. 

In the picture it looks more orange, but it felt warm and went well with my decorations.  I wanted it to feel warm in our current home without the orange look.

Here is our current home.  This was taken in the fall.  As you see there was nothing significantly wrong with the floors.  We went back and forth on whether or not to stain them.  The previous owner had different layers of poly in the floors ( 3 coats in Livingroom, 2 coats in dining room , and 1 coat in the family/sunroom).  We needed to take everything out of the rooms in order just to add the coats of poly.  Agreeing that we should just totally redo them now, we cleared the rooms on the first floor and decided to refinish them darker. 

BUT OH NO!!!!

The guy at the rental store said that we only needed to use the U-Sander if we were just getting rid of poly.  Hubby knew we used the drum sander on our previous home and was skeptical.  We thought that we got all of the poly and finish off, after all the guy said this was all we needed, but upon applying the stain we realized our mistake.  We ran out of time and did not want to spend more money.  Bad thinking......

I thought maybe if we add the carpet and furniture, it won't look like a leopard left his spots all over our house!

But no!  I lived with it for a week and felt sick to my stomach at how awful it looked and how that whole process turned our living quarters upside down.  I broke down to hubby and said "we need to do it all over again"  He was in full agreement.

So we rented a Drum sander and edger and went through the whole process again!

It was well worth it!
I really love the Espresso color!

Thank you family for dealing with your crazy mama!
We got these finished before the warm weather came.