Wood Floor Sanding Southampton

Having sanded wooden floors can make a big difference to the look and appeal of your house. Take a look underneath your carpets, particularly if you live in an older house, and you might be surprised at the quality of the boards underneath. With a bit of time and effort, you can transform even tired and dirty floorboards into an attractive feature.

Floor Sanding is a fairly easy DIY task as long as you take your time and have the right equipment. It is, however, dirty, dusty and noisy, so make sure that you have adequate ventilation and that you take the possible disruption into account.

Almost any wooden floor which has not been maintained for years will need a bit of tender loving care before you can sand it and expose it to the world. There is little point sanding and sealing a floor which isn’t in the best possible condition to start with.

The first thing you should do is check the general condition of the floorboards. Look for signs of dry or wet rot and treat this if found. Also look for signs of woodworm in the boards. If you see the tell-tale holes in the surface of the wood, you can be sure that there will be more underneath the surface. Luckily, in the UK woodworm is not such a huge problem as it is in other countries. That said, if you find signs of this wood-boring beetle, treat them before you start sanding. You can read more about Treating Woodworm here .

If any of your boards are warped or split, you need to replace them if you want a good finish when the floor is sanded. If possible, find second-hand boards which match your existing boards. Second hand and reclaimed floorboards can often be found at your local architectural salvage yard or even at a recycling centre. If you can’t find reclaimed boards to match, buy new boards and stain them to match the surrounding boards as closely as possible.

Finally, replace any missing nails and use a hammer and punch to drive all of the nail heads below the surface of the wood. The sanding process will remove at least a couple of millimetres from the surface of the floorboards, so aim to sink the nail heads by around 3mm.

If you are very lucky, your floorboards will be perfectly laid, with no gaps between them. For everyone else, the next job should be filling the gaps that have appeared between the boards. Over time, wooden floorboards expand, shrink, move and warp to reveal gaps. These gaps can be left as they are if not too large, but if you want a perfect finish, filling the gaps is the only way to go.

The most labour intensive solution is to pull up all of the boards and completely re-lay them. This is not too difficult, but it is time-consuming, even if it should give you the best final result. Once all of the boards have been lifted and butted up close to each other, the resulting gap can be filled with a new board (or trimmed board). Bear in mind that you might need to remove skirting b...