How to sand hardwood floors for it to serve you decades and decades and discuss the proper working methods.
Trend for natural building materials have really emerged in recent years, forcing many people “to return to the roots”. Indeed, what could be more traditional that natural wood floor? Whether it is parquet or wooden floor, wood fits perfectly into any interior. In addition, modern technology can give it any color, provide texture preserving the pristine material. Let’s talk on how to sand hardwood floors with your own hands correctly.
Whatever the final plan of the designer is, the first stage of the preparatory work is always polishing the wooden floor. And only then it can be tinted and coated with a protective structure. It does not matter if you have to lay a new floor or decide to restore the old grind – it is still necessary.
Sanding wood floor is a difficult process which is carried out in several stages. It is conducted with the use of surface grinding machines (drum sanders) to clean the flooring in order not to have miserable shortcomings and convexity.
Preparation of the surface
What to do before starting work?
- Take all the furniture away of the room;
- Remove carpets and curtains;
- Using a small chisel, detach the plinth very carefully;
- Hammer all the nails protruding from the wooden boards;
- Clean the house from dust and dirt;
- Prepare specific tools for grinding.
The tools:
- a grinding machine;
- sandpaper designed for the machine;
- small by hand typewriter called “the boot” for the immediate treatment of the room corners.
The necessary works:
cleaning the floor of the old coating using a scraping machine;- sealing cracks and cracks with putty;
- graceful grinding and scraping performed by a parquet processing machine;
- sanding herd-to-be-touched spaces and corners;
- the process of vacuuming the floor before cleaning and varnishing;
- varnishing performed in several layers;
- intermediate varnishing and sanding.
Consumables:
- aqua-based varnish;
- special putty (preferably, the manufactured putty mixture);
- brushes;
- rollers;
- abrasives (sandpaper).
Polishing the wooden floor
If you only need to remove the traces and imprint or slightly level your flooring, you can perform the updating of the wooden floor only. If you need to totally remove the long-standing coverage, then you need to make polishing performed for several times.
Updating
The old layer is removed or elementary grinded till it’s matt. It will be quite enough just to “walk” on the surface with orbital sanders.
Full sanding
It is necessary to make from 2 to 4 passes of a grinder. Sand a hardwood floor diagonally in the direction to the location of the fibers; wooden floors – strictly parallel to the direction of laying planks. Corners and edges before the final passage of the machine are traditionally treated with angle grinders. Then close all the cracks and seams, and after that, the clean the floor again. The next stage of work is processing sealant. After a couple of hours, you can perform grinding with a hand tool (using sanding sheets grit 120). After that, you will need to re-clean the floor thoroughly from dust and debris. Thereafter you can apply to the second layer of lacquer. It should dry well (for about 10-12 hours).
If you want to sand floors you should know that it is a qualitative report on the updating of the base at a ratio of considered as “work/results”. You can give you flooring the very original look by simulating different kinds of wood or aging equipment. One can even increase the environmental properties of timber applying natural oils and waxes.
Important pro tips
More high quality polishing can be achieved by treatment with a three-disc grinding machine.- For best results, you can put auxiliary loads up to 110 lb.
- It is really possible to perform polishing of parquet in the living space with a single-disc surface grinding machine. The equipment is more affordable, but the performance of similar units with the same way as the quality of the surface is significantly lower than that of similar devices with three disks.
- It is important to remember that prior to the grinding work it is necessary to perform a careful inspection of the floor, because it is will show you if it is really necessary to perform the full grinding.
- It is a terrible mistake to think that it is possible to sand the wooden flooring with sandpaper only – don’t follow the myths.
