On Oct 15, 1:27 pm, Andy Hall wrote:
On 2006-10-15 12:33:42 +0100, said:

What a shame to cover floors like these with carpet. I expect that
they had carpet in the bathroom as well.

That's uncanny. Are you stalking me?

I would address the bitumen issue first with scraping and perhaps a
suitable solvent to avoid it being spread around the surface during
subsequent operations.

Ok. That makes sense.

Following that, a chemical paint stripper to remove old paint, varnish
and so forth.

Nitro-mors, or something less aggressive? I've had a suggestion of
meths for the emulsion and turps/white spirit for the gloss.

If you want to address scratches and dings in the surface at this stage
you can try an iron and a wet cloth. This causes the wood fibres to
swell and may take most or all of a dent out. It usually won't do
anything about missing chunks of wood.

This is the ironic thing: it's been protected by carpet for at least 20
years so it's just the paint. The rest is in great nick.

For a finish, I quite like oil and wax mixture for a wooden floor
because I don't like glossy varnishes. It does mean having some kind
of floor polisher ideally though.

Ok, thanks for that. I prefer a more matt finish too.

I think it would be well worth the effort.

We'd talked about laying some kind of stripwood flooring on the ground
floor when our offer on the house was accepted - you can't imagine how
pleased we were when the previous owner mentioned "that there might be
parquet under the carpet". I've made a little start already and it's
looking *so* good.

Thanks again,
Gareth