Hi, I've recently ripped off a wood floor that cost around =A35k at the time. I would like to reuse it but its got quite a few dents and scratches on its varnished surface. Is it possible to take the lenghts of wood somewhere and get them sanded smooth again?
thanks
Easier to re-lay it and hire a floor sander I would have thought
How deep are the dents scratches? Doing individual planks would mean them ending up different thicknesses unless you put them through a planer/thicknesser but that might leave tell tale planer marks.
If they are only minor scratches and dings lay the floor then sand it in situ.
Google Thicknesser.
Its also possible to remove dents using wet paper and an iron.
NT
yeah, think I will go with this option. thanks all
arent the dents and scratches called patina?
sun snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.co.uk wrote:
also bear in mind that floors are normally seen from 5' up, not close up. What would be an entirely unacceptable finish for furniture can look great on a floor.
Is that one of their new apps? :-)
Any wisdom on what's best to use? (I'm not the OP, but have a wood floor in the upstairs hallway which was laid by previous house owners but never finished)
I've heard good and bad things about hiring drum sanders - and seen several places that have said it's better to just go and rent / buy a good random-orbit sander and do it that way (perhaps particularly true in a hall where the amount of area that a drum sander can reach would be a lot less than a full room)
cheers
Jules
yep it makes planks thicker by beaming them up to their secret base on the dark side of the moon and rearranging the molecules
beam me up scotty...
[g]
Domestic floors dont usually need sanding. If you do sand, you get a floor that looks like new, which is often with timber not so nice. Fixing any noticeable damage and leaving the rest tends to look better, imho anyway.
NT
We did four rooms in a long weekend (perhaps 50 sq. m in total) with sanders hired from HSS.
You can't get right to the edges with the big drum sander (you end up with about 10cm gap) so you need to go round with an orbital sander as well: this gave a good chance to compare the two. On our floor this means that the edge is about 2mm higher, so furniture tends to lean away from the wall :(
The drum sander is brilliant but deafeningly loud (I was having crazy dreams about the N O I S E after a couple of days). The coarse sheets were great for ripping through the horrible black shellac-style varnish that a previous owner had put on.
The orbital sander is much much harder work: you are knelt down right next to it so it's noisier and you have to hold on quite hard to stop it walking off across the floor.
There's no way I'd want to do a big floor area with an orbital: and you couldn't get the same consistent finish.
One problem we had was exposing woodworm tracks. It looks fantastic though after a few coats of Ronseal Diamond Hard.
thanks for the replies
The Moon.....Don't you mean, Sand-iego.?
Arthur
Only when it's just been sanded. Finished, it looks totally different to a new floor, as anyone who has replaced old boards with new will confirm.
, which is often with timber not so nice.
Depends entirely on how much you have to drink...
That's useful to know - I wasn't sure what the size of the gap would be. I read somewhere that you're supposed to run the drum sander diagonally though, which further puts me off using it in a hall (particularly as part of it isn't full-height due to sloping roofline above) because that's a lot of buggering about moving the sander without much actual sanding time (I can understand it for a room where it's possible to do nice long runs with it).
I just wasn't sure how well an orbital sander would cope with the job - sounds like it'll also be a bit of hard work (the boards we have aren't particularly level at the far end of the hall, so that's going to be interesting - OTOH that's in a part where nobody ever goes, so I'm less bothered about the finish!)
Yes, that's my main worry. I did 'attack' a test area (I figure we're either going to sand the floor up there or carpet it) with one of those little vibrating iron-shaped sanders the other week, just to get a feel for things (and because something had been spilled in that section in the past and I had no idea how deep it ran), and that did surprisingly well - but obviously not practical for the entire floor.
Ahh, no evidence of those, thankfully. I think the floors up there are white oak, although it's hard to be certain.
I'll have to get my act together and finish doing all the stair rails first (existing stuff has a wide strip at the bottom which looks horrible and Must Go, but that means I'd be exposing more floor when I pull it all up) - but as the subject came up, seemed a good time to ask!
Thanks for the info,
Jules
it looks the same, because it is the same, newly exposed wood plus whatever finish.
NT
You too eh :-)
Dave
If floorboards warp you tend to either get a high spot in the middle or high spots at the edges - so the thinking behind going diagonally is that the drum sort of straddles the unevenness and makes everything flat. Our floorboards were actually quite flat to start with - the main thing we were trying to do was to take off a few mm of grotty varnish and soot - so we went parallel to the boards. I should think in a hall this would be the right approach as well because trying to go at an angle would cause more unevenness than it would cure.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.