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Andy Hall Andy Hall is offline
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Default Restoring parquet flooring

On 2006-10-15 22:29:35 +0100, said:

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?


Well it was either going to be that or laminate flooring.


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.


I would start with the less agressive first, but realistically it will
probably end up being Nitromors.

Fine sanding might be another way. You could try that because in most
of the photos the paint doesn't look too bad.


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