Hi everyone. I will try to keep this short by sparing you the background story of how we arrived at this problem and what our thought process was while making decisions.

Basically we have American walnut floors which were stained super dark. We wanted to change them to natural as the walnut wood is so beautiful, so we decided to refinish. Our contractor recommended using water based sealer and finish in order to achieve the most “invisible” look.

We sampled Bona natural seal and Nordic seal, and decided to go with Nordic as it didn’t add any color, and it seemed to prevent tanning. The sample size on the floor looked fine. However, when it came time to lay down the sealer all over, it was extremely hard to work with and stared blotching up everywhere. Contractor thought this would be fixed by buffing, so he did that, and a lot of it appeared better (or so we thought). But when he went over it with Bona Traffic HD, after everything dried and cured, we have wound up with a streaky, blotchy white mess on our beautiful floors (and newly finished house).

We need to fix this and have no idea how. I have been in tears and now wishing we had just left it dark. After a lot of searching the web, reaching out to Bona, and speaking to some other flooring guys, what I’m finding out now is that water based sealers, especially white tinted ones, are NOT recommended on walnut. Our contractor basically treated our floor like oak.

The biggest issue right now is that Walnut is extremely soft and cannot handle nearly as many sandings as oak, so refinishing all over again may not be possible. Not to mention all the damage we did to our new walls and baseboards the first time around. Does anyone know of any less invasive methods to fix this? Will screen and recoat work if we add a dark stain over the sealer? Is it even ok to do that or will it make more of a mess? We are completely at a loss of what to do, any help would be greatly appreciated!!