Refinishing Hardwood Floors: Getting to Natural Wood

I know it's tough to focus on the worn hardwood in the picture when the paint is so horrid, but try to draw your eyes away from the yellow and red paint that has given my home the nickname McDuplex and see the "before" pictures of the hardwood floors. I closed on the home 11 days before I needed to move in, so I got to work right away on the floors. Refinishing floors kicks up a lot of sawdust that I didn't want on my furniture and other belongings after I moved in. Can you blame me? I immediately rented a floor sander for the weekend, and sand is what I did. Luckily for me I had a friend who wanted to learn how to refinish floors. He was willing to help me remove all of the old varnish and sand the floors to the bare wood. Not only is it quicker to do projects with others than doing it all alone, but we had fun with it. We decided that the 100lb sander wasn't sufficient weight to make the sandpaper effective so took turns riding the sander to add plenty of extra weight. Keep in mind that this might compress the pad in between the sander and sandpaper too much, so it would be a good idea to get an extra thick pad or get an additional pad to switch out when you are renting the floor sander.
It took a lot of sandpaper... and 30 grit sandpaper may seem too rough for wood (40 grit for a belt sander), but it was the only paper that would remove the varnish.
Recommendations:
Get a lot of 30/40 grit sandpaper!
Other needed items for getting to bare floors are:

• a push broom (also called a shop broom)
• face masks - there are special sanding ones and you'll need plenty
  
• sanders, of course - get a belt sander and a large floor sander
• a sanding block for hand sanding the corners
• while discussing sanding by hand, I highly recommend getting work gloves
• sandpaper - as I said, lots of 30/40 grit paper, but you'll also need 60 or 80 and 120 once the varnish is gone
  
• a shop vacuum and filters
  
• rags and mop/bucket for clean up
• friends to help =)

The shoe molding in my house needed to be replaced, so I also needed hammers to pull it up. It made sanding a lot easier too. But it's up to you to assess the quality of your shoe molding and to decide whether you want to replace the shoe molding (also called quarter-round).

Every thing I read says to get goggles, but I found that they fog up so perhaps glasses are better. Otherwise your eyelashes have to do all of the work... like so:



But... After a lot of sanding, your floors will look like this: