Which Should I Do First: House Paint or Refinish Hardwood Floors

[Anonymous]

We just bought a house and trying to figure out some logistics with painting and refinishing the hardwood floors. Which one should we do first to minimize damage to either? Intuition tells me that we should refinish our hardwood floors first then paint but my husband thinks its the other way around. FWIW, we are doing oil based finish on the wood floor and I hear that takes a longer time to cure.

Any reasons to do one before the other first?

[Anonymous]

Floors first - the guys who refinished our floors got a few polyurethane streaks on our baseboards after we had just painted all the trim in the house. Annoying.

[Anonymous]

I'd paint first. The paint falls down to the floor, especially the ceiling paint. But the floor guys can just sand it all away with the existing finish, before they put on the new finish.

[Anonymous]

19:35 again. It looks like your choice comes down to: scraping the wall and/or ceiling paint off your new floors, or touching up your floor boards. Not sure which is the lesser evil....

[Anonymous]

We did this to our new place last fall and my guys told me they preferred to do walls, then floors. You've got the dripping paint, plus the dust that the sanders throw up -- that's a pain to clean off the walls to ensure a smooth surface for the new paint. Plus there's the issue of fumes -- the oil-based poly is strong stuff and no one wants to be around it longer than they have to for the first few days.

[Anonymous]

Paint first. No matter how careful the painter is, they'll get splatters on the floor. Usually, they take the shoe molding off when they refinish the floor, and I don't recall having stain or poly on the actual trim when we refinished the floors.

[Anonymous]

Paint first! It's basically impossible to get drips of paint off newly refinished floors. It's true that the refinishing guys will get some stain on your baseboards if they don't remove them (at least ours did, and they basically said it was not possible to avoid that happening at least a little bit). Touching up the baseboards a little was not too bad, though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We just bought a house and trying to figure out some logistics with painting and refinishing the hardwood floors. Which one should we do first to minimize damage to either? Intuition tells me that we should refinish our hardwood floors first then paint but my husband thinks its the other way around. FWIW, we are doing oil based finish on the wood floor and I hear that takes a longer time to cure.

Any reasons to do one before the other first?

No matter what you are told, there is a lot of dust when sanding floors and it flies everywhere. Do floors first, vacuum down walls, put cover on floor when painting.