The appeal of natural hardwood floors is a timeless fashion among homes throughout London. There are many pros to stripping your floors back to their natural state, they’re incredible durable and easy to maintain. So for someone living their busy, London life, the effortless beauty of hardwood floors are the perfect option.
If you’re looking to refinish your floor, the amount of time and effort required to do this totally depends on:
a.) The current state of your floors
b.) How you want the end result to look
Achieving that natural look
You will most successfully achieve that natural, wood finish if you remove all paint and synthetic materials from the surface of the wood and applying a light finish. This applies if you have varnish on your floor as well because there’s nothing hardwood floors benefit from more than a refinish. If your finish is still in good condition, it is possible to get away with just lightly sanding your floorboards before applying a fresh coat of varnish. But if your old finish has worn away at the edges or left surface cracks in places, revarnishing your floorboards is definitely your best option as the end result will completely rejuvenating.
Sanding
Sanding machines are excellent if you’re looking to achieve a natural finish as they will completely restore your floorboards back to the natural grain of the wood. However, if you’re lucky enough to live in a house with old, traditional floorboards you might want to hold off on the sanding. Sanding flattens the surface of the wood and while this is often desirable in more modern houses, you can find that this removes the characterful bumps of ageing floors that is so sought after, especially in London properties!
The Stripping Process
Removing unwanted paint or varnish from your floorboards calls for the strength of an industrial, chemical stripper. You can find these from your local, London-based hard-wear store. When using products such as these, follow all of the necessary safety instruction and ensure that your room is well ventilated.
How to Remove Polish and Wax
One of the most unattractive qualities of old floorboards, desperately in need of a refinish are residual areas of an old finish. Luckily, these can be removed really easily with a simple white spirit and steel wool.
Simply apply a little white spirit to your steel wool or scouring pad and work it into the wood in order to dissolve the polish. Unfortunately this is a slow, tedious and necessary job as you can only attack small areas at a time, and you can’t apply varnish to a polished floor! Have patience however, because the old polish will soften eventually at which point you’ll be ready to remove it from the floor using a scraper. Deposit the bitty residue in a can ready to be disposed of and use an old cloth to remove the rest of the varnish.
