best way to clean and wax oak floors

[emilia]

Hello all, hoping you can help me decide how to clean and restore our lovely oak floorboards, we've just bought a new place which has oak floors that are ancient, our house is grade 2 listed and built in the 1700s, I've read anything from handheld sander to meths to white vinegar can be used to clean the floorboards and then either linseed oil or beeswax to finish them, if you've any ideas about what's best that would be great, thanks very much.

 

[worms]

Emilia, just to say 'hi' and bump this back to the top. There is a lot of floor knowledge on this forum (both amateur and professional) so I am sure you will get an answer. Might also be worth trawling the archives as this comes up fairly frequently.

 

[emilia]

thank you! I will have a trawl too but any neat ideas would be most welcome, importantly some of the floorboards also have that black Victorian varnish around the edges of the room and we'd especially like to know how to remove this black stuff without damaging the wood, thanks again

 

[DJH]

There was an interesting article in the Georgian Group magazine 'The Georgian' a year or so ago Emelia about floor boards and the author wrote that floor boards should never be sanded back to plain timber. His argument was that floor boards gained their patina through years of wear through polishing, scrubbing and foot wear. I kept the article in 'a safe place' and can't put my hand on it at the moment. I'll keep looking as there were contact numbers in the article.......

Doug

 

[emilia]

hello Doug and thank you if you can dig it out that would be great.

Simon-do I have access to the archived forum as it seems locked and indeed I would like to see what past answers on this there are, maybe I'm missing something though! thank you

 

[Keith Bowman]

Don't, whatever you do, sand them. If they are already lovely, do as little as possible. Our elm boarded floor was in a bad way with many splashes/blobs of paint of different colours down the ages, different dark stains around the edges and general grot. We took the worst of the paint lumps off very carefully with a sharp scraper then cleaned it up using a stainless steel pot scourer and soapy water - followed by rinsing/wiping with a damp cloth. Once it had dried we simply treated it with hard wax oil. If I have managed this right there should be before and after pics...

 

[Keith Bowman]

To add to that - the stainless steel pot scourer was the softish curly, woolly ball type! Just washing with a cloth or even a scrubbing brush was not enough.

 

[dans]

We've just done our 500 year old oak floors, which have come out lovely.... But with a lot of work!

1 bucket warm soapy water
1 bucket cold clean water
1 hard floor hand brush from a DIY shop
1 sponge

Don't completely soak the boards, but use the hard bristled brush in te soapy warm water and scrub the floor HARD. If the boards are old oak, you'll be hard pushed to mark them. Do a section at a time, wiping the dirty residue off the scrubbed boards with the sponge and clean water.

Change both waters regularly so you're not scrubbing the dirt into the boards.

We finished ours with two coats of clear liquid beeswax, and they've come out a lovely golden colour.

1 room took me a solid 3 days. I have 5 more rooms to do

The result is worth it however!

Whatever you do: Do not sand them.

 

[dans]

Forgot to say- make sure you sweep and Hoover first, then keep hoovering after each section. No point in rubbing in all the dust you just cleaned off!

 

[dans]

Before & after (but pre-wax)

During

And after, but only one coat wax.

 

[angrybird]

dans the floors look great , thats one of my next jobs to tackle but mine are bog standard pine boards not lovely oak like yours x

 

[dans]

dans the floors look great , thats one of my next jobs to tackle but mine are bog standard pine boards not lovely oak like yours x

Thanks

We' ve got some Victorian pine boards downstairs which I plan to start restoring too- I think the old pine floors also look lovely, with a nice big rug in the middle. They all offer their own charm!

I'm not 100% sure our upstairs boards are Oak- they could be Elm? Someone once told me that they used to use elm boards from ships, but I'm not sure how much truth is in that...???

 

[DJH]

To my mind that's exactly how floors should look, absolutely spot on, well done.......

Elm was sought after for flooring and structural work for it's ability to shrug off being wetted without rotting as quickly as other woods, and, before Dutch Elm disease was plentiful in England's green and rolling land. There are a few elms growing here in Ireland still.

Doug

 

[dans]

To my mind that's exactly how floors should look, absolutely spot on, well done.......

Elm was sought after for flooring and structural work for it's ability to shrug off being wetted without rotting as quickly as other woods, and, before Dutch Elm disease was plentiful in England's green and rolling land. There are a few elms growing here in Ireland still.

Doug

Thanks Doug.

We have a few Elms in our garden; all of which are dead as soon as they reach around 3m high... Make good firewood though!

 

[emilia]

Thanks all - this is great info and good to know that the dreaded sander won't be needed!

Actually, maybe I speak too soon...

Does anyone know the best way to remove (presumably victorian) black paint / tar around the edges of rooms (i.e. the bit where the rug wasn't)?

I have hard that this can be tricky and that solvents are the best way to remove it. I am a bit worried that the original boards and the stripped back paint will be different colours after the process is done.

 

[masochists-r-us]

If soapy water doesn't do the job I would try a solution of caustic soda and water (follow instructions on the bottle) we found this to be very effective for some old varnishes/paints and it also loosened gloss paint blobs which I then removed with a scraper. Whilst it does raise the grain as will any application of water, the patina was not affected. If this doesn't work, I'm afraid you will need to go for paint stripper.

 

[Keith Bowman]

Does anyone know the best way to remove (presumably victorian) black paint / tar around the edges of rooms (i.e. the bit where the rug wasn't)?

I have hard that this can be tricky and that solvents are the best way to remove it. I am a bit worried that the original boards and the stripped back paint will be different colours after the process is done.

We didn't bother to try to get all the black/darker stain around the edges off. You can still see a difference in shade in the second of my pictures. It's part of the history of the house. We did mange to get it lighter and I think it was the scrubbing with the stainless steel pot scourer which helped most. As others have said, you don't want to drown the floor with water and it's best to have two buckets, using a cloth rinsed and wrung out in the second bucket to wipe the mess off as you go along. And change the water frequently. Don't rush it, rinse/wipe it clean after each bit and then rinse the whole floor over again when it is all done. We managed a board or two a day. Being retired gives you more time, but the older knee joints limit the amount of it you are prepared to spend on all fours! I should try a bit first with soap and water before resorting to paint stripper - and caustic soda is a paint stripper although I suppose it depends how much you dilute it: a saturated solution is pretty potent! (perhaps he meant washing soda?).

 

[Zebra]

There's a company often recommended on here who will find you the right stripper for the job. On their website is a dropdown list product selector: www.stripperspaintremovers.com/

 

[Keith Bowman]

PS if you use caustic soda make sure there are no holes in the rubber gloves - or there will be holes in the fingers too!