Most durable wood floor paint?

Hi, We manage a local community beach house: many people with wet feet and lots of sand walking in/out, and tables & chairs being moved around alot too. The floor is painted wide-plank wood flooring and we cannot change that (bu dget, aesthetics, etc). Typically we repaint the floors every 5+/- years a nd this last time should have been sooner because the paint job peeled up v ery fast. In the past, we've rented a floor buffer machine and used grit p ads to roughen the surface before painting.

Can you recommend a VERY durable (commerical?) wood-floor paint?

All advice appreciated. Theodore.

Reply to
millinghill
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ts of sand walking in/out, and tables & chairs being moved around alot too. The floor is painted wide-plank wood flooring and we cannot change that ( budget, aesthetics, etc). Typically we repaint the floors every 5+/- years and this last time should have been sooner because the paint job peeled up very fast. In the past, we've rented a floor buffer machine and used grit pads to roughen the surface before painting.

linoleum is cheap. durable and available in many colors

Reply to
bob haller

I understand your intent, but I can't change the floor type. Has to be (some type of) paint on existing wood.

Reply to
lakepurdys

I don't know about commercial paints. There may be some kind of industrial product available, but you'd probably need to research that. Probably check at a paint dealer that serves contractors. They may have something like an industrial paint made for concrete warehouse floors.

For regular paint, the best I know of is Benj Moore oil base, urethane reinforced floor and deck enamel. (Or maybe it's "porch and deck".). It's very tough. But when it peels it's hard to scrape because the film is very hard. I've just been looking at something from Sherwin Williams. I've forgotten the name but it's a new formulation of water-base that they claim is extremely durable and will even fill in small cracks. Sort of a thick sealant coat. They make fancy claims about "cross linking" structure. It looks interesting, but there's no way of knowing whether such a new product will really be good.

One thing is certain: If you use any normal water-base acrylic or latex it won't hold up. It's no good on floors in the first place, and water exposure will destroy it much faster. So you're left with the limited selection of oil based paints, most of which have been degraded into less durable products due to reformulation to meet fume standards.

Reply to
Mayayana

WHY????

Reply to
bob haller

I appreciate the suggestion, but I really need to stick to paint.

Reply to
lakepurdys

Why do you H A V E to stick to paint? I can tell you right now there is no paint that will withstand constant foot traffic and look like it's never been walked on.

Reply to
ItsJoanNotJoann

| Why do you H A V E to stick to paint? I can tell you right now there is no paint that will withstand constant foot traffic and look like it's never been walked on. |

The question was not what to use. He's said 3 times that it needs to be paint because of budget and aesthetics. The plan makes sense to me.

Reply to
Mayayana

Any paint that will withstand the abuse will likely cost as much as commercial linoleum, so it comes down to asthetics or the OP's personal preference. It's less Can't, and more Won't.

Reply to
clare

Ok, thanks for the recommendation.

Reply to
lakepurdys

I was in the industrial battery business and we'd typically coat the floors in battery rooms with epoxy paint.

It held up very well in an industrial environment so in a beach house it should work great.

Reply to
philo

| Any paint that will withstand the abuse will likely cost as much as | commercial linoleum, so it comes down to asthetics or the OP's | personal preference. It's less Can't, and more Won't.

That's your opinion. I'd disagree. I'd expect the paint to go $50-$100/gal, while linoleum might be $1,000 to get installed on a similar area.

And aesthetics is not just a silly concern, so "won't" is not stubbornness. (It might be for you, but this is not your beach house.) We don't know what the beach house looks like. I'm imagining something like one sees at public beaches, a bare shack, perhaps painted gray. If it were me I certainly wouldn't want linoleum on such a floor.

In any case, that's not for us to decide. The question was about paint. The linoleum idea was suggested and rejected. So that's out. Arguing that the OP is wrong is just wiseacreing as a backseat driver, which is not helpful.

Reply to
Mayayana

| I was in the industrial battery business and we'd typically coat the | floors in battery rooms with epoxy paint. | | It held up very well in an industrial environment so in a beach house it | should work great.

I was thinking about that, too. I once did railings in a condo development where the owners had got an epoxy paint. I never found out what the stuff was. It went on thick and created a nice shell for the pipes used in the condo deck railings. But I did it in hot weather and was only getting about 15 minutes out of a batch. That's one notable limitation with epoxy: One can ruin a lot of work before getting just the right mix and figuring out how long the open time will be in a particular scenario.

I've noticed that there's also such a thing as "one part epoxy" paint lately. I have no idea whether it's any good. It sounds to me like a misuse of the word epoxy for marketing.

Reply to
Mayayana

It is legitimate, but can be misleading. You think of epoxy as a two part chemical reaction substance. The so called one part epoxy paints have an epoxy based filler in them. I guess you can grind iron to a powder add it to the liquid and call it iron paint.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

I have the same question, and it is a question that has recently come up in another forum for rental property owners. The general consensus seems to be that most "porch and floor paint" products by various manufacturers just do not hold up well when painting wood porches, floors, stairs, etc.

I just did a quick Google search and here's one link that came up:

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It is not much of an article, but here are a few things that it mentioned:

1) Roughing up the surface before repainting (of course). 2) Using a shellac-based primer for areas that are very worn and that need priming. 3) Consider using an alkyd or oil-based paint instead of latex enamel for possible better wear (they downplayed that idea, but am interested in that option since latex based enamel doesn't seem to do very well in my opinion).

I would be interested in knowing what others think about that last option -- using alkyd or oil-based paint instead of latex enamel porch and floor paint.

Reply to
TomR

Marine topside paint is pretty good. There are multiple formulations, some one-part, and some two-part. It is expensive; I bought a quart this week and it was $49 US. Pettit and Interlux are common brands.

Excellent source for both paint and advice is at

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Your paint will last longer if you coat all sides of the boards, including the bottoms.

Reply to
No name

| It is legitimate, but can be misleading. You think of epoxy as a two | part chemical reaction substance. The so called one part epoxy paints | have an epoxy based filler in them. I guess you can grind iron to a | powder add it to the liquid and call it iron paint.

That doesn't sound legitimate to me. The power of epoxy seems to be in the polymer chains created during curing, as it is with paint, for that matter. But grinding up top quality lead paint and putting the powder into a can of KMart latex paint is not going to make a high quality paint. :)

Reply to
Mayayana

| 1) Roughing up the surface before repainting (of course).

And wash, with very hot TSP solution, or non-sudsing ammoniaif you can't get TSP -- something without soap in it.

| 2) Using a shellac-based primer for areas that are very worn and that need | priming.

Never use shellac outside. And even inside it's mainly used for sealing. For adhesion you want a penetrating primer, preferably with linseed oil if it's exterior.

| 3) Consider using an alkyd or oil-based paint instead of latex enamel for | possible better wear (they downplayed that idea, but am interested in that | option since latex based enamel doesn't seem to do very well in my opinion). | | I would be interested in knowing what others think about that last option -- | using alkyd or oil-based paint instead of latex enamel porch and floor | paint. |

I would never use latex/acrylic outside on horizontal surfaces. It simply doesn't resist water. It's also soft and tends to peel in a film. I avoid latex for anything but walls and siding stain. But the options are limited right now.

The whole issue has become a big problem. Good quality oil paints are being phased out faster than the technology can keep up.

I used to use urethane reinforced oil-base deck paint for steps and decks. I also used oil paint for trim and siding. In the 80s they came out with oil-base "stain", which will mostly wear off rather than peeling. So I switched to that where I could. It saves a lot of scraping down the line. Solid oil-base deck stains were also pretty good. That's what I have on my deck now. They don't last as long as paint, but they're easy to re-apply, while urethane reinforced paint is very hard to scrape.

More recently solid oil-based stains and deck stains are being phased out. The latex solid stains, while good enough for siding, are useless on steps and decks. They just wear away within a year. So there isn't any ideal solution. On my deck I'll probably try to hunt down another gallon of Cabot's solid oil deck stain for the next coat. After that? I'll be tempted to try some new "high-tech" solution like the new Sherwin Williams deck products. The problem with those, though, is that they're simply unproven. I can't afford to have people calling me back on jobs because their deck paint slid off the deck in a sheet and landed in the driveway.

(I actually remember a case like that in an article in Fine Homebuilding back in the 90s. California had set new paint regulations. A contractor used the new paint on a bathroom wall. The customer called back a few days later to say the paint had fallen off. The contractor assumed they meant it was peeling. But no, it was sitting on the floor like a length of curled-up wallpaper. :) Current paint technology is not much better than that. Acrylic paints are better than ever, but they're not *good* in the ways that oil paint was good. Meanwhile, the oil paints still available have mostly been downgraded -- thinner and softer than the older versions.

The entire building industry is faced with changes that are just happening too fast and may not all be good. Remember sprayed polyurethane insulation? It was the cat's pajamas 20-30 years ago for filling attic areas. Then it turned out the stuff gave off formaldehyde. When I come across it now there's also another problem: With age it gradually breaks down into a pile of very fine, choking dust. Yet spray insulation is the new must-have approach for new building. Will it work out? There's no way to know. Even if it turns out OK, I wonder about electricians trying to snake new wires later, in a house where every gap inside the wall has been filled with hard foam.

If I were building a deck for myself now I'd probably test-try the new Sherwin Williams product. If I had a more finished porch, with a roof, I might use the urethane-reinforced oil paint. I couldn't recommend anything else. But with that paint you may be cursing 10-15 years later, when your steps or porch look like a relief map of different scraped layers.

Reply to
Mayayana

Even though the OP said "community beach house", I think he meant an indoor floor made of wood planks, not an outdoor deck etc. And, in my case, I am mostly interested in what to use to paint indoor hardwood floors that have already been painted in the past.

No one seems to have a specific answer for that question. Personally, I just plain don't know the answer.

Reply to
TomR

Googling around, it looks like paint manufacturers have attacked problem posed by op.

I was curious because sand is very abrasive and I could not think of a plastic that might resist it.

One manufacturer was talking about nano metal technology that helped but did not offer complete solution.

Reply to
Frank

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