Floors
This is now the forth ‘old house’ renovation I’ve worked on and on all three previous occasions, I have at some point ended up enduring a hearing-damaging date with a hired industrial sander. These cumbersome machines, rather like glorified lawnmowers but with slightly more serious consequences if you make a mistake, provide an efficient if somewhat heavy-handed way of cleaning dirty and warped floorboards by removing the top 3-5mm of wood. The result is a uniformly blonde and level wooden surface that buffs up like new with a bit of wax or floor varnish.
Fine.
Except, in the truly awkward way that we Osmonds like to operate, I’d gone right off the whole ‘buffed up like new’ aesthetic (see my previous post Wrinkles & Saggy Bits). Plus, the floors in this house were a lot older and more delicate than those in my previous houses and the drum sander would likely cause too much damage. Instead, I embarked on series of trial and error methods of manually cleaning the boards using the following tools and methods:
- Paint scraper – ideal for dislodging blobs of emulsion and gloss paint.
- Stiff bristle brush – cleans loose debris out of rough grain and worn dips.
- Wallpaper scraper – runs into the gaps between the boards dislodging the built up wax and gunk giving a straight edge to the boards
- Wire wool and white spirit – gives the wood a deep clean and lightly abrasive surface removes built up layers of wax and muck.
- Cotton cloth – to absorb excess white spirit.
- Drill and nylon filament flap brush attachment – bit more abrasive for removing unwanted floor paint or varnish that may have been applied to the edges of the room in the past.
The idea was to use only the amount of force and abrasion necessary to clean the surface of the wood without wiping out the undulations and wear patterns caused by centuries of footfall. In some places, mainly on the corners of one or two boards, the damage was excessive in which case the wood was cut back to good wood with a multi-tool cutter and a new piece shaped and glued in with Gorilla Glue.
Any boards that had been lifted for plumbing, rewiring or under floor insulation, were screwed back using slot headed brass screws. This was preferable to nailing them back as it is likely boards will need to be lifted for access to wires and pipes in the future and unscrewing them is far less damaging than levering them up.
Finally, I finished with two coats of Manns Floor wax and a buffing up with a fluffy attachment for my drill, which is a deeply satisfying stage of the process and hilarious to witness when your children leg it into the room in their socks and cannot change direction or stop themselves!