On 2006-10-15 12:33:42 +0100, said:

We discovered on moving in to our house a month or so ago, that under a
vile red carpet in the living room was some beautiful parquet flooring,
presumably dating from when the house was built in 1956. We've now
finished painting the ceiling and walls and have lifted the carpet to
look at the parquetry more closely.

Clearly, previous owners have shown little regard for it as it has
numerous areas of misted paint spattering and others with larger smears
and stains of paint. In a few other places, the bitumen layer that the
floor stands on has seemed through the gaps in the wood blocks. I have
put some photos of this on my website he

http://www.marlow.org.uk/parquet/

Unaffected areas look fine - a little dull through having been under
underlay for at least 20 years, but nothing that a good clean won't
sort out. But we're wondering what the best way of restoring the
paint-spattered areas will be - scraping? sanding? something chemical?
Any advice gratefully received.

Gareth

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

You may well need to sand it to address some of the dings and scratches
ultimately (or treat them as patina), but that needs to be carefully
considered because the wood can often be quite thin. A typical
problem on floors like these was the impact of stiletto heels and
little indendations.

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.

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

Finally a light sanding.

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.

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.

I think it would be well worth the effort.