If you're in the restoration industry, you've been there. You know you have this beautiful, thick, wide-plank, hand-sawn set of slats under your feet. But between the sole of your work boots and that antique hardwood, you have a few decades of paints, stains, polyurethanes and lacquers you need to hack through to restore the flooring to its natural beauty.
In our region, many of the run-down mills and factories have taken on a new life, refurbished to suit urban dwellers' live/work preferences and to fill in the housing gap. These vast buildings often reveal thousands of square feet of wide plank flooring, which can be sanded down, refinished, or reused in other projects.
This tutorial provides tips and a step-by-step guide about vintage floors, and how to tackle them.
The first step is to procure both a belt sander for the bulk of the floor and a disc sander or floor edger to handle the delicate spots and
Baseboard edges. Another consideration is a floor scraper and, if you have electric baseboards to contend with, a smaller sander to get at their undersides. Lastly, there's the poly,lacquering and staining, but we'll revisit those issues later on.Since heavy-duty sanders are only required on occasion and are expensive investments (upwards of $2000, never mind the accessories and upkeep costs), it's best to check into renting them over a long weekend, which should only cost around $200 with the sandpaper.
Sandpaper comes in many varieties, categorized by the durability of the
material, the type of material that the paper's 'grits' are made out
of, and the 'grain' of the paper. Commercial vs. Industrial: Unless you're embarking to refurbish the Atlantic City boardwalk, commercial sandpaper will work out fine.
Grits, or the shards of 'sand' that cut up the surface, are usually made from aluminum oxide, garnet, or ceramic. Aluminum oxide is fine for most small jobs, and keeps sharp over extended use. Garnet wears easier but leaves a smoother finish, while ceramic is designed to peel off multiple layers of flooring at once.
Grains refer to the total number of 'grits' embedded into the paper per square inch. Smaller numbers are coarser and handle the brunt work of peeling off those numerous layers of gunk. Larger numbers have a larger grit count, using finer grains of sand for delicate finishes and final passes. For most floors, having three progressive sets of sandpaper on hand should do the job. The photo above shows a 20, 36 and 60 grain sandpaper, cut for the belt sander and ready to be used on an old industrial mill floor.
For varnished floors, a couple passes of the sander with progressively finer grains of sandpaper (in woodworker's parlance: going through the grits) should do the job, while painted floors will likely need a scraper for the tough spots, and an additional pass. Most residential jobs start with a 36 grain sandpaper: coarse enough to remove paint and varnishes, yet fine enough to handle thinner floorboards.
For all sanding jobs, be sure to carry along at least a disposable paint mask, and for larger jobs, a respirator with charcoal filtering. Sanding any floor will generate large piles of dust, and older floors are likely to give up varnish and paint chips that are better off out of your lungs and in the trash heap.
Outside ventilation is also a must. Piles of dust within a room can quickly become an explosion hazard. Hardwood dust exposure can also irritate the skin, so be sure to have your extremeties covered. More information about precautions you can take when handling wood dust can be found on the U.S. Department of Labor's OSHA web site .
As belt sanders can produce a day's worth of irritating noise, save yourself a headache and bring along some heavy-duty ear protection muffs as well.
Many belt sanders have a groove where both ends of the sandpaper are folded in to keep it in place. For thinner sandpapers with a smaller grain however, that groove will be wider than the thickness of the paper. To prevent slippage, use a narrow piece of cardboard to wedge the sandpaper inside the groove.After inserting the sandpaper, tighten the belt sander's barrel evenly, making quarter turns on each side until the nuts no longer move.
Be sure to keep the belt sander working along the wood grain, slowly rocking the sander back and forth until the untreated wood shows through. Give each floorboard a uniform amount of exposure to the belt sander to avoid an uneven finish later. Since you'll be going through the grits to get a smoother finish, don't strive for layer-peeling perfection on that first pass.When the sandpaper shows its wear and begins to lose its grip on the floor using the belt sander, portions of it can in fact be reused for the touch-up jobs with the disc sander.
Remove the sandpaper, then with shears, cut out a quick circle with the same diameter as your disc sander. Load it into the disc sander, and you'll get longer use out of the paper, while saving some money in the process.
The disc sander will be used to smoothen out the tougher blotches of paint, and the floor along the baseboards. This disc sander shown here is a Silver Line SL-7 floor edger, equipped with a vacuum fan and chamber.Always keep the edger moving, working in a semicircular motion. When you sand along a wall where the wood grain runs perpendicular to the baseboard, rotate the edger to the right on each board so you avoid sanding against the grain. You could also sand from the wall or baseboard to the area that has already been cut by the belt sander. Using this method, you cut a line along the baseboard, and then sand out to the drum area in foot-long sections.
You'll want to have a sit-in with the disc sander. A few minutes of bending over as the sander does its work might propel you to find a stool or milk crate to sit on. Here, our demonstrator, Felix, leads the disc sander along the baseboard, gliding himself and the crate along the same path and using his feet for guidance and support. This tip will likely save you a hernia or two.
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