Everyone loves dogs don’t they? Their happy faces, wagging tails, always excited to see you – what’s not to love? Well, one thing that perhaps isn’t as quite as excited to see dogs however, is solid wood flooring…
The Customer Visit
A client contacted Ollie and I from Badgeworth, down in Somerset. They were looking to give their existing Pippy Oak floor (also termed ‘cats-paw’) a bit of a spruce up. The years of dogs trotting around on them had started to take its toll, and they wanted to bring the solid wood flooring back to its former glory. No problem for us here at Freshwoods!
Day One
We turned up to the property on Monday bright and early and began the process of restoring the floor, which included a living room, study and entrance – totalling 44 square metres. The initial process involved multiple passes of our Bona Flexidrum belt sander with 24 grit sanding paper. Then we progressively decrease the coarseness of the paper from 40 grit, down to 80 grit, finally finishing on 120 grit. As well as the main sections of the flooring, the edges of the floor were worked using our Bona Edge Sander, again using the same method as the central areas.
For any little flooring areas that the larger machines can’t reach, we use a Festool Delta Sander and Festool Eccentric Sanders to take care of any hard to reach sections. All of our sanding machines are always connected to a dust extraction system, to keep dust to a minimum.
Now that the floors were baby smooth, we moved onto the first application of oil in the flooring restoration process. We applied the first coat of Morellos Induro XLO 30% sheen Hardwax Oil. The Induro Oils provide a smooth, natural finish and have superb resistance against water and other liquids – perfect for any dog related spills!
The oils were applied using a roller, rolling horizontally across the boards and inline along the skirting boards. A perfect stage to finish the first day.
The following day we returned to ‘denib’ (remove nibs or imperfections trapped between layers of finish) the floor. This process involves gentle sanding with 180 grit paper, before applying the second and final coat of Morellos Induro XLO floor oil.
A final once-over to check that everything is perfect and our work here was done. Another fantastic job if we do say so ourselves! We were delighted with the final finish and we’ll let the images speak for themselves…
The feedback we received from the customer couldn’t have been better;
“Our floors look fantastic and are standing up well to the dogs. Rob and Ollies workmanship was excellent and the floors look better than we’d ever hoped for.
Thank you both, Wendy”
If you have a solid hard wood floor in need of attention, get in touch with us to find out how we can help restore it.
