Ask Mr Sanders

Hi and thank you for your question about the use of commercial grade floor varnish or oil in domestic properties. The quick answer is yes. However, there are several things you need to consider when choosing the most appropriate floor sealant for your floors.

Once the floors are properly sanded to a smooth finish, it is extremely important that varnihs is applied right away to ensure that the bare timber is protected from any accidental spillages. Choosing the best type of sealant requires not only consideration of how the floors are expected to be used, but also how often you will be bale to maintain them in the future. While lacquers provide a more durable and hard wearing sealant, it is important to note that they do not allow for local scratch repairs and once floors are damaged, they would need a total resanding and revarnishing. Therefore, some customers prefer the use of wood floor oils, such as Osmo Oils to seal their floors. While oiled floors allow some minor floor scratches to be repaired and reoiled locally, without the need of overall sanding, it is important to note that they do require a regular wood floor re-oiling service to maintain the sealant.

Should you decide to go for a lacquer rather than oil, we would recommend the commercial grades of some renown varnish producers such as Loba Varnishes, Bona Laquers and Junckers sealants, which we regularly use for our floor restoration services as they provide high level of protection and durability.

We hope this information was helpful and don't hesitate to contact us if you need any further assistance or if you would like to book our floor restoration service.

Hi and thank you for the question regarding the choice of sealant for pine floorboards.

Pine is soft wood and while it is possible to seal pine with both laquers and Harwax Oils, we would always recommend the use of hardwearing varnish when sanding and sealing this type of flooring. The reason for this is that pine tends to absorb oils, which means that pine floorboards sealed with hardwax oils will have lower level of protection and durability compared to those sealed with varnish. This is particularly the case where staining is required. Therefore we would recommend stained pine floorboards to be sealed with hardwearing varnish.

We hope that the above helps.

Generally speaking bamboo flooring is possible to sand and varnish. However, we would always aim to do a free site survey before we can advice on the state of your particular flooring and its potential for restoration. Because restoration of bamboo flooring require a fair bit of sanding skills and knowledge, we would always recommend the use of a professional floor sanding company like FloorWorks instead of DIY to ensure best results.

Gap filling is ofthen a services that goes along with our wood floor restoration services. It is very common that over time some gaps appear between the floorboards or between the blocks of parquet flooring. The good news is that smaller gaps are relatively easy to ractify by the gap filling service, where a mixture of clear resin and saw dust, which is collected from the sanding process is used to fill in the gaps. Nevertheless, it hsould be noted that bigger gaps are trickier to fill. This is where strip filling comes handy. Strip filling is very similar to gap filling, but instead of just the mixure of clear resin and saw dust, bigger gaps between the floorboards are also filled with small pine slivers. While this is often an effective methid, it is not recommended that strip filling is applied throughout the whole area as this may result in undesirable visual aesthetic effect due to the number of additional small strips added on to the floors.

Another important point that should be noted for both gap filling and strip filling is that the effectiveness of both methods is highly dependant on the solidness of the floorboards and their subfloors. Gap filling as well as strip filling may sometimes fall through if there is a movement in the floorboards or any movement in the joists that hold the floorboards. Therefore, gap filling is excluded of our service guarantee as their effectiveness depends on things that are beyond our control.

Yes, staining can be performed on any wooden flooring including stairs. Once the area is sanded to a smooth finish we can apply several samples of different colours on your stairs so you can choose the colour that best matches teh rest of your flooring.

I hope that this helps.

Yes,

Underfloor heating is ideally installed under engineered wood flooring with a click installation system. This allows for the floating installation of the engineered floorboards, without the need of gluing down or nailing down. Engineered floors have been specifically designed to withstand temperature and colour variations and are therefore perfect choice for homes with underfloor heating.

Yes, we would be more than happy to help with the restoration of your stairs and banisters.Bear in mind that stairs and banisters restoration is a more time consuming compared to restoration of other areas of wooden flooring as majority of the work needs to be done manually. It also requires a great deal of care and attention to details, therefore it is always a good idea to leave this to a rpofessional floor sanding company liek FloorWorks instead of trying to do it yourself.

Hi and thank you for your question regarding parquet flooring restoration and fireplace heart removal.

Fireplace removal and parquet floor extension with matching parquet blocks is definitely something we can help with. Once the fireplace heart is removed, we will restitch the parquet flooring and once sanded  and revarnish the floors will be left with an uniform appearance as if the fireplace had never been there before.

Yes, as part of our floorboards restoration service it is often required to repair and replace damaged floorboards. Therefore, before we do floorboard sanding, we always inspect the floorboards to make sure that, where needed, wood floor repairs are done before that sanding. As part of our floorboard repairs and replacement services, we always aim to secure any loose floorbaord, but where the board is damaged to an extend beyond repair then we supply and installed reclaimed floorbaords to do a replacement. It is very important that the replacement seasoned floorboards are carefullys elected to match the colour and the sage of your particular flooring as much as possible. This ensures a more uniform appearance once floors are sanded and varnished.

Hi and thank you for contacting us regarding sanding, staining and re-oiling your three-strip engineered wood flooring.

Most three-strip engineered floorings come with 3mm top layer of solid wood, which means that they can be sanded only once. So the first thing that you need to do is make sure that your flooring has never been sanded before.

Given that your floors would allow for another sanding, it is perfectly possible to change the colour of the natural oak by using coloured oils. A huge variety of colours are available from the Osmo Oils range, which we highly recommend and which we regularly use for our restoration of oiled floors services.