Care of pine and limestone floors

[CHRIS]

I am a big fan of the OSMO poly wax as it is very hard wearing and dries overnight, plenty of heavy traffic due to mad Dog and dragging work tools and equipment into house (gives nice quick patina). This is on a new oak floor not pine but I love the non yellow finish. You can leave hot cups etc on the floor and will not mark and comes up clean with some Ecover linseed soap and a green scotchbrite pad. To buff get dog to lay on wool blanket and spin her around - she loves it

 

[Penners]

plenty of heavy traffic due to mad Dog and dragging work tools and equipment into house

I wish I could train my dog to do that.

 

[CHRIS]

She used to have a HiViz jacket for when she came to work with me near heavy plant on a few road jobs. She even carried my wooden Surveying pegs along in her mouth.

 

[Jon Maine]

With regard to the floor finish, a hardwax oil is a good way to go, Osmo is well established but the floor sanders who did my floors used Treatex ( they said drying times were trickier with Osmo) which from what I can work out looks much the same down, is hardwearing, dries quicker and has is a greener product by far. If you do go down the route of a wax oil you should not polish with wax but wash with floor cleaner with a bit of oil in it. You can also apply a rejuvinating oil to top it up when it gets a bit worn.

I would suggest getting a sample of both treatex and osmo and playing yourself, the maintenance should be far less than waxing. I scrubbed, vacuumed, washed and applied maintenance oil to 130m2 in just over a day which should be good for a long time now as it only got dulled by building dust being ground in.

 

[JoceAndChris]

I scrubbed, vacuumed, washed and applied maintenance oil to 130m2 in just over a day

As I suspected you are Superman.

Thanks Jon, the oil sounds interesting as it doesn't seem to need so much buffing and reapplication as wax. But how will it be after 10 years? Regular waxings over time create amazing patina.

As you say, I'm going to have to try these different things and see how they behave over time.

 

[Jon Maine]

Yes blue vest and tights, red pants and housemaids knee.

As I understood things, waxing floors over a period of time actually needs them stripping back periodically as to much muck gets engrained and the build up of wax can be excessive. I guess it depends upon type and volume of traffic and other variables.

As for the oils, I believe with oak it will continue to go darker gradually over the next century or two. The finish has a lovely warm glow to it, as I understand it the Osmo and Treatex are very similar once applied. For ease of maintenance and good looks I would go with either Osmo or Treatex, I would however read the green credentials of each product first and from my experience and advice from the professional floor sanding company I used go for treatex. Incidentally they are called "Total floor care" they are on the net and were very reasonable with their charges costing around £15 a metre to fully sand the floors and coat with 2 coats of treatex. I thought about hiring macj=hines and doing it with my labour but they were very quick and proficient it was cheaper to employ them.

 

[Toby Newell]

Hi

Quickly. I would use as little water as possible to clean your floors, old seasoned interior wood does not like getting wet. I would use as little water as possible to avoid warping.

Sanding appropriately will clean up your pine very well. I have sanded several thousand square meters of floors, many of them on my hands and knees with hand sanders, some over 550 years old and it is perfectly possible to do this and keep all of the patination. (I have many pics if you lack confidence)

I would not use a buffer. My buffer costs £1500 and I still would not use it. A drill attachement will melt the finish and the £200 buffers are not much good either. Traditional wax is very soft and will melt under a machine, its hands and knees for waxing, the secret is to put very little on and remove straight away. The modern pseudo waxes like osmo aren't anything like a traditional wax, more like a modified varnish, best use one of those. You can apply with rag, brush or roller, clean every month with wood soap and apply another top coat every 12 to 18 months.

Yes it is in period to paint your pine staircase, unless it is particularly grand and carved 99% of pine staircases were painted and in my opinion look much better for it.

Toby

 

[Nina]

We have cleaned our 200 year old pine floors with very little water and lots of rubbing. They were really dirty. We used a handsander very carefully. It did not spoil the floors but greatly improved the look of them but all this was hard work. We have used both Osmo and Treatex and I prefer the finish of Osmo. I clean them infrequently with either Treatex cleaner or a general wood cleaner. However, they do not shine with wax or vanish... I have just stuck big rugs on them. However, they are nice wide floorboards and do not need a lot of adornment.

 

[JoceAndChris]

Toby and Nina, thank you for your kind input.

I wouldn't hire a big floor sander again. That was a disaster with the only fun bit being that that the floor sander hire man (who has fathered ten children) kept finding reasons to ring me and tempt me with new tools!!! He did not succeed, of course.

The floor sander was a runaway beast that put huge score marks in the boards: I'm going to paint them anyway as it's the bathroom but I couldn't risk it again.

When you say a hand sander do you mean something along the lines of the Bosch PSM 160A?

You have managed to put me off a buffer.

Glad to have another vote for a painted staircase, and yes, agree that rugs make wood floors look beautiful.

 

[Nina]

Sorry Joce ... you are geting much to technical for me but our tool is a Bosch and it is easy to use on hands and knees. It did not gouge out chunks of floorboard or set the whole house shuddering. One of the reasons I wanted to use something gentle was due to the original ceiling and cornices below. I did not want to dislodge anything or cause more cracking.
I also like the rather rough look of my floorboards but this would definately not be to everyones taste.

 

[Penners]

I wouldn't hire a big floor sander again. ......The floor sander was a runaway beast.

I quite agree. In inexperienced hands (no offence intended - that includes my own!) they can gouge away huge amounts of wood before you can get them under control.

 

[AMc]

That Bosch PSM 160A appears to be a palm sander - good for very small spaces and tight corners. My decorator has been using a Makita one to give my sash windows their 120 year service. I would think this will be a fiddle to do any size of area and you're likely to end up over sanding and under sanding and ending up with a patchy finish.

I've done floors and stairs with orbital sanders which take 1/2 or 1/3rd sheets of standard sandpaper (60 then 80 then 120grit). It's slow work but I kept the 'age' of the boards while getting a smooth finish on the boards but not a smooth floor.

My carpenter recommends a belt sander for refinishing floor boards as it sands in one direction so you can follow the grain.
For example http://www.screwfix.com/prods/33078/Power-Tools/Sanders/Bosch-PBS7A-3-Belt-Sander-Micro-Filter

I've also used the big floor sanders which may be good for getting a smooth floor (i.e. flattening many boards into a single flat surface) but I found it hard to use - the belts shred on the smallest tacks and it took great chunks out of an uneven floor. For the cost of a weeks hire + belts you can buy a decent quality handheld power tool and a roll of paper.

Whatever you get make sure it has some form of dust extraction, seal the room as best you can and take a big bottle of water in with you. Floor sanding IMHO is very satisfying but the mess is phenomenal. Keep the sawdust to make filler for the floor before you seal it.

 

[JoceAndChris]

Thanks very belatedly for this advice AMc. Doing the bedroom floor now. Where the boards are really kind of crumbly (particularly under the window, where woodworm has been rampant) the sander lifts great slivers of splinters out. It's all a bit stressful. Do I just stick the splinters back with wood glue? The boards are a mixture of pine, pitch pine and ash, and look about 200 yrs old.

Anyone recommend a range of stains for matching new boards to old? There are new boards in the doorway. It all looks such a dreadful mess of wood eaten boards, chunks missing where mice have come up, and paint splatters I might have to do what Penners advised months ago and get a new carpet.

Is painting with oil eggshell in a soft cream morally wrong?

 

[JoceAndChris]

Scrap the above. I can't do this floor. I'm calling in the professionals!

 

[Nigel Watts]

Somewhere in the archives on this site is an article by Toby Newell, as well as a number of threads to which he contributed. These are well worth looking up. Toby is a professional french polisher who also restores floors. He did my hall and drawing room, with excellent results - much better than the builder who did my bedroom. SPAB also do (or did) an excellent leaflet on floors.

The key is minimal sanding. Old floors great character and natural irregularities which can be killed by over zealous sanding, staining and varnishing.

 

[JoceAndChris]

Thanks Nigel. I know about Toby's work and have emailed him for a quotation to come here.

The floor's too fragile for me to work on it, plus the last one I did was not satisfactory, and caused a trapped nerve in my shoulder, which cost hundreds to put right. (I have a history of back surgery and have to accept my limitations sometimes!) So it will be good to hand over to experts in this case.

 

[Nigel Watts]

Joce
I am amazed at how much you do, given you have a back problem. My wife has a compacted disc and has to be very careful. Knowing when to let go and call the professionals is important. I hate doing it beacuse I fear they wont do a good job, but you should be safe with Toby.

 

[JoceAndChris]

Thanks so much! My back's OK really, and good for jobs that call for a variety of big movement -ie digging- where things go badly wrong is after many hours of small repetitive movement, ie sanding, polishing. You mentioned your wife does yoga, I think, which is excellent for disc problems.

I completely understand, and share your fear, about getting tradesmen in. You just know that in most cases they are not going to spend ages and ages on it, as we would! And floors are particularly susceptible to butchery, as I've learned to my cost. Having a really old floor with tons of character and patina you want to preserve calls for a very careful and knowledgeable treatment. In this case, where sandpaper has touched the worm eaten section it has bitten down into the tracks of the worm and resulted in an unstable, splintered, pock marked surface. But I really, really, don't want to replace these boards unless I absolutely have to.

Not sure Toby would come all this way, (incredible that some of his floors have ten coats of wax!) but I've found a French polisher locally who's coming out to quote as well.

 

[Nigel Watts]

Tony is not a joiner, so if you have boards to mend or replace you may want to get someone else to do this first. A good piece of advice he gave me before I mended my floors was that I did not have to use old wood. I managed to find some wide Russian pine boards at a timber merchant in Hammersmith and he then stained them to match.

 

[Flyfisher]

Joce, your floorboards sounds very much like our attic room floorboards where years of neglect, leaks and knawing creatures have left a lot of them in a very bad state indeed. So bad, in fact, that I've laid loose sheets of mdf simply so that I can walk around safely and not put a foot through the floor/ceiling.

Sad as it is, there comes a time when things really are end-of-life. I'm considering laying a new floor over the existing boards, which will at least leave the original fabric in place. But if you only have a few boards in really bad condition then I don't think you should lose any sleep over an honest repair.