Timber Floor - Day One

I decided to try doing the timber floor in the hallway first.  It's a relatively small section and a naturally shadowy area of the house.  You can see my thinking?  If I completely mess it up, it would be controlled damage and I can just put the lino back over it.  :)

I didn't want to rent any drum sanders or whatnot, even though every recommendation says that that is the only way to do it.  I'm trying to keep the price down, plus didn't really want the inconvenience of hiring big heavy equipment and then be on a time limit to get it done.

So belt sander it is!

Newly uncovered floor

I started by lifting that sticky lino tape on the right.  Wow, really sticky.  And it left behind a black, gooey stain behind.  I got a lot of it off with methylated spirits and scrapers, but it was still all stained black.  

So I foolishly spent more time with the sander there, got most of the stain out, but managed to leave behind rippled gouges in the wood.

I'd been told that old jarrah is very hard, which makes it very difficult to sand, and I will now put the testimony of my experience behind that too.  I started with 40 grit paper and it barely made a dent.  So I had to put some force on the sander and spend about 4-5 min on each little section.  Then the same with 80 then 120 grit.

Finished sanding

I'm sure a professional would say I didn't cut deep enough, but without a drum sander, it was the best I could do with the jarrah.  I tried using my detail sander along the edges and corners, but it left really obvious scratch marks.  So I tried by hand, which was near impossible, but I managed to scuff them up a little.

After sanding came multiple vacuums, sweepings, moppings, hand wipings and a final go over with methylated spirits.

At some point in that floor's history, someone has sanded it with a heavy duty orbital sander which left big swirly gouges in it's wake.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get rid of them all, but once I went over with the metho, it gave me an idea of how the finished product would look and I decided that it wasn't too obvious.

So next came the polyurethane.  After much indecision, I finally decided on Cabot's CFP Floor, Water Based in Satin.  I chose the water based over oil because it has a much faster drying time and doesn't smell.  And seeing as I am home all week, I reckoned that those things would be very important.

While applying the first coat, Molly came up next to me to look.  I thought she would be naturally repelled by it, but after a pause, she walked straight out onto it and then stood just out of reach for me to grab her, leaving a neat little trail of pawprints behind her.  Argh! 

I called her to come and she eventually came back off, leaving another little trail.  Thanks Miss M.  It was probably revenge because I took a mouse that she had caught away from her a few hours before.

First coat complete

 One of the other reasons I chose the water based polyurethane over anything oil based was because I had read that water based keeps the wood looking lighter, whereas anything oil will darken it quite a lot.  I really wanted to keep the jarrah looking as natural as possible - I think that light red is beautiful.  

After the first coat I was a bit disheartened by how much darker it looked, plus there were these weird white cloudy marks along the edges.  I hopped online, but the most I could guess at was that it might have been residual moisture in the wood.  The wood sucked up the first coat and I wondered if it had found some internal dampness - it had seemed perfectly dry to me, but it is the middle of winter.

I contacted a friend who had his floor done recently (professionally) and although he used an oil based finish, he said that white cloudy marks came and went and different stages, so not to worry.  Which made me feel a little more hopeful.

So with aching legs, arms and shoulders, I finally went to bed and slept like a log.