Taking photo shop a little too far....

Those floors would come up well with just a buffing machine. It was the sanding drum machine but with what looks like fly screen instead of grit paper.

Our son had that done in his house and they looked freshly sanded, but he lost no depth of the boards in the process.

 

If you can do it with just the buffing sheets it gives you another sand later when you really need it.

Funny story... our son's kitchen had never been sanded and we removed a wall so the long ago sanded floor now ran into the never sanded floor. We assumed the sander would re-sand the whole floor, but he just sanded the kitchen separately, and then ran the buffer pad through the rest of the house. It was about $1k in total.

Funny part is that we assumed he would be lightly sanding everything and we didn't use drop sheets. He said "sorry, but you need to scrape off all the drops and I'll need to move into the first clean room in about an hour". Lovely man and fantastic sander so we got down on all fours (hubby and I started and I put out an emergency call to youngest son and oldest son's partner who were not at work). We got buckets of water, scrapers, brillo pads and formed a line across a room at a time, scraping, washing down, complaining, whinging, complaining and more complaining, but we got the whole house done in time.

Sander moved from room to room after us.

The son who owns the house was totally unaware of all this. He was at work.

 

I'd never seen this "fly screen" buffer pad used before. I'm not saying this is something that can be done on every floor that has damage, and we've had many floors sanded over many years, but never had just this "buffing" done before. I thought our son would end up with a floor that looked better (but not great) but he ended up with a floor that looked freshly sanded.

It means one day he can sand the whole floor again and not have lost any depth with this sand.

The red wall came out and the kitchen floor behind was given a normal initial sand, then the whole house was run over with the "flyscreen" pad. You'd never pick where the wall once was.