Advice needed on cleaning up old beams

[pineapple]

A local wood restorer has been recommended to bring the horrible old beams in my 18th century cottage back to life. He is highly regarded in the area and has recently done a fantastic job in a nearby farmhouse.
Most of the beams have a coating of varnish or stain and there are some bits which have been hacked at and bodged in the past. Anyhow the main job is taking them back to the wood. He proposes using a sander attached to a vacuum cleaner which he says will keep down the dust. I will be living in the property at the time and am not convinced that the mess won't be unbearable.
But also if sanding is going to be the bulk of the work, is it something I could do myself (providing I get the right protective gear and kit)? I'm a retired female with just basic DIY skills and not huge energy levels. I restored the beams in my last house but using KlingStrip - which still turned out to be quite an arduous process.
I did see a company online advertising a no mess 'back from black' water based process but it sounds too good to be true. :?:
The other thing I am concerned about is that when I bought the property a couple of years ago, I had the timbers woodworm treated. Not that I thought I had live woodworm or have any faith in the process - I just wanted the piece of paper for re-sale. But would sanding the beams negate any benefit (if there is any) - or worse - release toxins into the air?
Cheers

 

[noj]

Can't help much I'm afraid.

The 'back from black' process is actually just painting the beams with water based paint to look like wood - a modern take on the wood-graining paint effect as far as I'm aware. It could be effective though, not seen it in the flesh.

Sanding is a pretty destructive process - particluarly if your beams are uneven or have any overpainted worm damage or original saw marks etc - inevitably sanding has to remove everything (paint and wood) down to a smooth finish that's just wood. Your CO may have an opinion on this if you're listed? It'd be messy but certainly less so, and less destructive, than any sort of indescriminate blasting.

There is an attachment for a jet washer and vacumn cleaner (that can handle water) combination that makes klingstrip removal less arduous but may not be practical if you're living in the cottage at the time or have any level of decoration/carpet to preserve.

It's one of the (many) PP holy grails you're looking for - if you find a good solution please share!

 

[Flyfisher]

We have a variety of original exposed beams, some of which have been painted though fortunately not the best ones.

Frankly, we've learned to live with the painted ones and - shock horror!! - have even over-painted some of them ourselves. :shock:

I've looked at various options for stripping them back to bare wood and have admired the heroic exploits of some members on here, but concluded that life's too short for such gruelling, invasive and messy work and it's not as if we don't have plenty of other works to complete. Not very helpful, or even admirable, I know but after a few years we don't really notice the beams are painted any more.

But, as in all decorative matters, it's a personal choice.

 

[MikeG]

Sanding is a bad idea. No, it's a really bad idea. They look good, but they look sanded, and you'll lose all the historic detail, including carpenter's marks and so on.

Paint stripper and washing, or dry-ice blasting, are the only 2 methods which will leave you with clean undamaged beams.

 

[pineapple]

Thanks folks.
The main reason for renovating the beams is that the low ceiling in the lounge consists of the bedroom floorboards and the beams - all in 'dark wood'. I could lighten up the room by either plastering between the beams or (cheaper) painting the boards with cream or white. The problem with either is that this will highlight the beams which are not very nice at present. I could of course paint the beams but this may count as a crime against humanity. Not listed by the way.

The kitchen beams are lighter but one issue there is that some of the cross beams are new saw cut replacements,

 

[noj]

If you really want lighter then traditional distemper (or maybe claypaint) could be the way to go - something where you can choose the colour but is relatively easy to reverse/remove if you or the next occupant wants to go through the pain of stripping the wood at a later date.

No crime there - everything original is preserved

 

[Kearn]

Personally I would give a lot for varnished/stained beams over the unfortunate sandblasted pale, dry, and worm eaten specimens that the PO gave us in our house.

Yours look lovely, dark maybe, but I had assumed black. Darkness in the room can be solved with light and furnishing, and as you say, lime plaster the underside of the boards which would provide a lovely contrast with the wood and is easily reversible unlike many paints.

Is it a stain or a surface covering? Obviously a stain will have penetrated the wood, so removing it isn't very feasible (without removing a lot of the wood itself).

As had been said. Please do not sand on an industrial scale. You will lose character, markings and the smoothness that only hundreds of years can provide. Plus, it will make one hell of a mess, vacuum or not. A slow job by hand could get around the safety of the finish a little, but more mess and a lot of time, sweat, tears and swearing! Chemicals are your safest option, as you probably know.

If it were me, I'd be really happy if our beams looked like yours!

 

[skier-hughes]

I'm gradually cleaning ours with klingstrip and a vacwash. It's still quite messy but we live in the house while I'm doing it. Just make sure you do any upstairs rooms first!
For a quick fix why not just paint over with something not to horrendous and brighten the room a bit. In out lounge the floorboards are papered with analypta painted what was probably white some 50/60 years ago

 

[Toby Newell]

Disclaimer: I have hand scraped and sanded beams for several months, I have never blasted any beams but have seen the results of both sand blasting (all are similar) and dry ice blasting. So considerable direct experience with the former and a little indirect experience with the latter two techniques.

1. Sander attached dust extractor will keep down the dust. Check. That's only partial disclosure. It will keep down the dust, I am fanatically clean compared to anyone I have ever worked with and I have all the toys and yet, it's still very dusty, obviously vertical beams and beams lower down are less dusty than doing overhead. If it's concern then possibly the mess may be unbearable, a good contractor will advise you of this.

2. Is this something I could do myself. No. At least you probably wouldn't want to. It's incredibly hard work, I had to take almost 6 months off heavy work after I completed 150 meters of beams in a large job in the winter, because of wrist tendon pain,that's extreme, but it's very hard work. You will get cut, bruised, splintered and end up with bits of wood in places you wish you didn't have them.

3. All the blasting firms claim that their 'blasting' is gentle. Just read that word again, now go and look it up in the dictionary. To blast. Doesn't matter what spin you put on it, all blasting techniques damage the wood more than mechanical sanding and scraping and leave a soft, slightly fuzzy surface. Ice blasting uses liquid CO2 which is very cold, it makes things like oleo resinous paints (like oil paint, traditional varnish, bitumen) very brittle and so they peen off, unfortunately wood also is a somewhat resinous material and so it gets slightly more brittle and chunks can break off which is what happened to a customer of mine and his reclaimed mahogany parquet floor blocks.

4. Sanding the beams (albeit less than any other abrasive process) would probably remove most of the woodworm treatment and yes would possibly release toxins into the air as most pesticides are meant to be pervasive. Seeing as you have no signs of a live infestation you don't need to get the timber retreated and it's questionable any certificate you get would be worth much. As long as the room is reasonably well heated and there are no obvious fresh frass deposits there's no need to treat. It could even be argued some people would be turned off if they knew they were surrounded by pesticide.

If you want to strip beams sanding and hand scraping is the gentlest method although all are messy and expensive and all will remove some patination, some more than others.

Painting them is an easier way to make them lighter.

 

[MikeG]

.......3. All the blasting firms claim that their 'blasting' is gentle. Just read that word again, now go and look it up in the dictionary. To blast. Doesn't matter what spin you put on it, all blasting techniques damage the wood more than mechanical sanding and scraping and leave a soft, slightly fuzzy surface. Ice blasting uses liquid CO2 which is very cold, it makes things like oleo resinous paints (like oil paint, traditional varnish, bitumen) very brittle and so they peen off, unfortunately wood also is a somewhat resinous material and so it gets slightly more brittle and chunks can break off which is what happened to a customer of mine and his reclaimed mahogany parquet floor blocks.......

Oak isn't resinous, and the results of dry ice blasting are extremely good with old oak beams and boards, which is what we are talking about here.

 

[88v8]

Good that you're not setting about erasing all the inconvenient features of your lovely cottage.

Our elm beams upstairs were sandblasted in the 70s. It removed what I guess was white paint and perhaps even some plaster, but has also removed the outer (wormed) skin of the beams so they look like an exhibit in a natural history museum. Better than the white paint, but still....

Messy, sanding is messy, gradually the dust will get everywhere but everywhere.

You posted previously about it being dark in the sitting room. I would call it 'cosy..
If the beams are sanded but the floorboards not - and I bet it's not practicable to sand them so that's how it will be - I think it will look blooming odd.

If I were to do anything, and I have a great affection for 'cosy' so it's an if, I think I would paint the boards. They were painted in most old cottages, I would guess. Satin cream paint... will look OK. and probably leave the beams alone.

The other thing I would do is add a little overhead lighting. Not downlighters or spotlights, don't know which is worse but neither belongs in an old house, but fabric shades on gold pendant wire, preferably with bakeiite or porcelain roses on the sides of the beams, and small LED bulbs. The (black) cable (with black clips) can be run along the beams and won't notice.
The ceiling's too low for pendants you might say. so is ours, about 6'2", but the thing with small pendants like this https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/4-Antique-Vintage-Floral-Decorated-Parchment-Type-Lampshades/312122149257?hash=item48abee0989:g:uxgAAOSwmCVY-NW1 is that they can be placed above furniture so one doesn't usually walk beneath them, and when one's head does come into contact, well, they're soft, so no harm is done to either party.

Might post a pic later.

Lovely unstructured kitchen btw.

Ivor

 

[Toby Newell]

@Mike G

What is your experience with ice blasting? You say very good. On what? Friable worm eaten beams? Do you know a company that does that?

Thanks for the materials information. Oak has medulary rays that are a different texture and structural make up (harder) than the rest of the timber, these get brittle with age.

Cooling a substrate will move parts of it nearer to it's brittle transition temperature which can lead to localised failure. As I said. It works, mainly in industry to remove grease and dirt from very expensive rubber moulds, in aerospace and electrical relays that cannot have solvents doe to explosion risk.

The use on sound ceramics, stone etc and dense, flat timber to remove thick, viscous coatings such as bitumen, paint and varnish may be effective.

On old beams it's going to damage them more than sanding QED.

 

[MikeG]

Clearly I have more experience than you then Toby, if that's your assessment. My 300 year old cottage was ice blasted, with no damage. It left all the friable timber friable, and removed awful amounts of all sorts of paints and distempers etc, revealing all the finest of fine details on the original timber surface including carpenters' marks, whilst doing no damage to any of the surrounding lime plaster. You're more than welcome to come and inspect if you happen to be in Suffolk. Further, I viewed 2 properties that had been ice-blasted before I decided to do it on mine, and, as an architect specialising in ancient buildings, I have used it on at least half a dozen projects since then. The results are universally wonderful. It is in no way comparable to sand blasting, or sanding, which are much more destructive processes (the former an order of magnitude worse than the latter). I'll go further: it is less destructive a process than wire brushing.

The only thing I would be cautious of is using it on softwood. The great contrast in hardness between the growth rings and the intermediate timber of pine means that it leaves a somewhat sand-blasted effect. There was a late 20th century batten on one of the tie beams they cleaned at mine which suffered a little, but the oak it was attached to can't be faulted. Many of the mortises here were filled with various form of plaster over the years, and where they've been blasted, the paint has gone, but the surface of the plaster hasn't been damaged beyond a little roughness.

 

[Toby Newell]

Aha. There we have it. You use it on your projects.

And yes you do have more experience with it than me.

I somehow doubt any violent mechanical process will leave friable timber untouched, it's a simple law of physics, action and reaction but due to my lack of experience people can make up their own minds.

For removing bitumen from mahogany blocks it damaged them badly. I suspect the treatment doesn't always work as you described, if it did there would be no need for hand stripping with DCM stripper but I'll leave

Not sure why I would want to visit, I am sure there must be high resolution before and after pictures somewhere.

After all, it is a little bit of a holy grail.

 

[MikeG]

Aha. There we have it. You use it on your projects........

Is that some sort of gotcha moment? What if I countered with "Aha, you use sanding on your projects"? Then we could both say....."this is what I have found to be the best method" (only you have never seen the results of ice blasting).

...... I suspect the treatment doesn't always work as you described, if it did there would be no need for hand stripping with DCM stripper......

£1000 per day might just have something to do with its lack of universal use. :wink:

.....I somehow doubt any violent mechanical process will leave friable timber untouched, it's a simple law of physics, action and reaction but due to my lack of experience people can make up their own minds.......

Just be careful not to accuse me of lying, won't you.

 

[MikeG]

Duplicate deleted.

 

[Flyfisher]

Not sure why I would want to visit, I am sure there must be high resolution before and after pictures somewhere.

Pictures would certainly help . . .

 

[Toby Newell]

Mike

I am normally quite careful with my words. I wouldn't want to accuse someone of lying, just your statements are factually incorrect. Any blasting will damage friable areas, action and reaction, maybe we have a different understanding of friable.

Gotcha moment? Your prose seemed like a sales brochure as it stated ice was the bees knees and better than everything else! It was obvious you are a contractor who uses the system.

Whilst you are correct I have not seen the results of ice blasting on beams per se I have seen the results on Mahogany as I stated, it broke bits off them and mahogany has less rays than oak, I was very careful to state this.

I do however have several thousand hours actual personal experience stripping timber by hand, chemically and with machines, not just phoning a man and watching. I have never said sanding is the only method or best method, it all depends on what the client wishes to achieve. I have been on this forum since day one and have actually sanded the beams of the sites founder in his cottage and was careful to sand around the warding marks on his hearth beam.

I think you have to be careful, maybe reread your own long post, it seems a little marketing.

I question received wisdom and 'new super shiny things that does everything like magic' as I more often find factual inaccuracies, these threads are perused by home owners years after they are posted and so I think it's helpful, when I am on, to offer alternative opinions so people can make a more informed choice.

As stated I have personally stripped several liner miles and thousands of square meters of timber much of it by hand and if there was an easier way I would genuinely like to find out more. I have never heard of anyone in the restoration trade using it, which seems strange. If it is as gentle as you claim then presumably it could be used on tables, veneered items / stairs / doors /panels etc and I no of no one who has used it thusly in the trade. Which seems odd if it's so amazing. And then theres the damage I have seen with my own eyes, so please excuse my inquisitive nature.

Why are there no hi res pictures before and after?

And £1000 per day seems reasonable. I charge less than a third of that and I normally bring around 15 to 20K worth of equipment to the job, I am presuming the ice blasting machines cost similar, what you are paying for is the efficiency, I am sure the ice blasters can strip more than I can in a week in one day and so for jobs of a week and over it could turn out to be very good value for money.

Although I am pretty certain with my experience that ice blasting isn't quite as good as you make out, in some circumstances it may prove useful, if you could provide me with the name of the company you use and provide some photographs that would be appreciated.

For French Polishers around 50% of our working life revolves around stripping, it's tedious, hard work, tricky, bad for your health, creates fumes and dust, if I never have to strip anything again for the rest of my life that would suit me down to the ground.

 

[MikeG]

I am normally quite careful with my words. I wouldn't want to accuse someone of lying, just your statements are factually incorrect. Any blasting will damage friable areas, action and reaction, maybe we have a different understanding of friable.

'I didn't say lying, but you're lying'. Righto.

Just to see what you understand of the process, what is it that actually makes contact with the paint & timber?

Gotcha moment? Your prose seemed like a sales brochure as it stated ice was the bees knees and better than everything else! It was obvious you are a contractor who uses the system.

So you don't even bother to read what I write before you react, and this without any first hand knowledge of what I am talking about. Read this bit very carefully, and then apologise and withdraw:

I am an architect. I specialise in ancient buildings, and in low energy buildings, domestic only these days. I have no connection with any ice blasting or timber cleaning companies.

Whilst you are correct I have not seen the results of ice blasting on beams

Yet you feel able to tell someone who has quite a lot of experience of the process that you know better than them. Interesting, wouldn't you say?

I think you have to be careful, maybe reread your own long post, it seems a little marketing.

In light of the fact that you now know that I am an architect, independent of any such companies, maybe it is time you re-read what I wrote. Further, I have been a professional furniture maker, and still make stuff for friends and family, so I know more than a little about wood and wood finishing.

I question received wisdom and 'new super shiny things that does everything like magic' as I more often find factual inaccuracies, these threads are perused by home owners years after they are posted and so I think it's helpful, when I am on, to offer alternative opinions so people can make a more informed choice.

I too question received wisdom. I tend not to pontificate on stuff which I have no direct knowledge of myself, though.

I have never heard of anyone in the restoration trade using it, which seems strange. If it is as gentle as you claim then presumably it could be used on tables, veneered items / stairs / doors /panels etc and I no of no one who has used it thusly in the trade. Which seems odd if it's so amazing. And then theres the damage I have seen with my own eyes, so please excuse my inquisitive nature.

You know very well this a spurious argument. The veneers themselves may well survives ice blasting, but 1 to 3mm below the veneer lies old and brittle wood glues. This would very likely not survive the thermal shock. Further, it's difficult to see how you could justify hiring a team and their equipment for a days worth of furniture stripping.

Why are there no hi res pictures before and after?

So that you can accuse me of being a sales person, a contractor running a ice blasting business?

Coming up in the next post (and no, they're not "hi res".........they're taken with my normal site camera, and weren't taken with the aim of showing the timbers before and after.

I don't take well to being called a liar, nor to having aspersions cast on my professional judgement by someone who hasn't even seen the results of the process. I kindly offered you a tour of my own house so that you could rub your hands over the timber, and examine the results yourself minutely. (You might have enjoyed my workshop, too).You didn't even say thank you, and chose to sneer instead. With the greatest of respect that I can summon, I suggest that you back away from your keyboard right now, and don't write anything on this subject again until you have visited a site and seen the results for yourself. It won't be mine.

 

[MikeG]

Before

After

I can't find those of the carpenter's marks etc. I've got 4500 photos to sort through.