Hey everyone, just found this forum and im needing a little help with my floors. I bought a fixer upper house a few months ago and we didnt have a lot of time before we moved in to work on the floors. They were all in horrible shape and needed to be redone. My father, in his infinite wisdom, rented a drum sander and wall sander and proceeded to strip every room in the house.
He actually did a decent job with the drum sander, but there are several dips where he let it sit too long. The real problem is around the walls were the little rotary sander was used. There are tons of swirl marks all around each room. I have stained our bedroom floor already and basically i went around the entire room with a little hand held orbital sander to get the swirls out. Which worked ok, but i really dont want to do that for the entire house
I have had a few people out to give estimates, but with money being hard to come buy these days, i just cant afford to get it professionally done right now. Not to mention we are running the risk of really damaging the floors with spills and stuff. I saw that the Home Depot has this http://www.homedepotrents.com/diyTools/floor_sander.asp
Has anyone used one of these before? Do you think i would have any luck doing it this way?

Thanks in advance

Actually that is how it is done. Those that know how to run an edger and have it set up properly, still have a little ROS, or hand sanding to do, to blend the two areas around the perimeter.

Stop marks are a little harder to address, but at this point all you can do, is feather it out.

Now you know exactly why the professionals ask for monetary compensation and not just a free lunch.

Common sense goes a long way, to reduce the learning curve your experiencing.