Pine Floor Restoration
Our Service Journey
Often disregarded as lower quality floors, pine boards still have a lot of potential. Since most properties have pine floorboards, pine floor restoration is easily available and affordable way of getting wooden floors in your house. We specialise in restoring pine floors and we can undertake all aspects of restoration work including repairs, insulations, filling gaps between floorboards, sanding and sealing and more.
Pine Floor Repairs
In a lifespan of a pine floor it is very likely that floorboards will be damaged at some point because of work undertaken in a property by different trades. In most cases these are electricians and plumbers that need to access pipes and cables that are underneath the floor. Once floorboards are being lifted, they can be easily chipped or even completely broken.
As part of our pine floor restoration process, we can undertake floor repairs too. We can improve or replace joists if needed and replace damaged floorboards if needed. We always use matching boards – either reclaimed floorboards from somewhere else or new boards of different wood species to match the original ones.
Once such repair is completed and floor sanded down, the “new” boards blend in very well and cannot be easily recognised.
Pine Floor Underfloor Insulation
Pine floor restoration work gives homeowners near one of a lifetime opportunity to fully expose the state of subfloor and to have underfloor insulation installed.
It is only logical to insulate your floor, especially on ground floor. Underneath your wooden floors is just cold air, so having your floor insulated greatly improves thermal performance of entire property.
Our approach is to lift all boards, treat all joists against future rot and wood boring insects, install insulating panels and only then lay the flooring back. The actual insulation boards are silver foil backed and vastly improve both thermal and acoustic properties of the building.
See how we insulated our client’s pine floors in his property in Salisbury.
Pine Floor Gap Filling
Another way of improving old floors’ thermal efficiency is filling gaps between floorboards. Floor gap filling on suspended floors eliminates draught from underneath the flooring. At the same time it stops anything falling through floorboard gaps making floors much safer, cleaner and warmer.
We fill gaps between boards exclusively using larch wood slivers. These are long wooden strips sharp on one side. We hammer them in floorboard gaps one by one with wood adhesive.
Correct practice is to fill every single gap on a floor. Once a floor is sanded, you end up with completely gapless surface, which would look very odd next to areas that are not filled. Also, if only one gap would be filled, a gap filling wedge would push floorboards apart over time and fall though.
There is a very good reason why our slivers are made of larch wood. One could be forgiven for thinking that best colour match for pine flooring would be pine. It is however much more complicated in wooden floor restoration world. Wood ages over time and changes colour. Most floors that need gap filling are close to a hundred years old. If you ere to buy new pine wood and use it on such floor, it would look very different. It would be the same with the slivers – pine or new pine slivers would not blend in with the rest of the floor. Larch slivers however match old floorboards perfectly.
Once slivers are in the gaps, we can sand over them to make them perfectly flush with the rest of the floor, making floors perfectly gapless with matching solid wood filling.
Pine Floor Dust Free Sanding
Core of our services is of course dust free floor sanding. We use exclusively completely dustless German machinery by Lagler. Mix of years of experience, professional sanding techniques and top of the range sanding machines allows us to achieve excellent results and 100% customer satisfaction.
Sanding pine floors requires a right approach. Every wood species needs to be treated differently as they ‘act’ differently when sanded. Pine floor sanding is actually much more demanding compared to sanding on oak or birch. Pine is naturally quite soft so abrasives have to be picked accordingly. Any sanding mistakes or use of wrong kind of abrasives would result in serious marks, which would be very difficult to remove.
Our specialist team will make sure that your pine floor is sanded down the right way from the very start of the job to provide the best finish possible.
Pine Floor Staining
But what if you have pine floors but you are not very keen on having standard yellow / orange pine boards? We can do something about it too! We can apply different wood dyes to change appearance of the floor to something to your liking.
Once the floor is sanded down we can present you with a few colour samples to show you what we can achieve on your floorboards. We always make samples on floorboards we work on as only then you would get the right idea about achievable floor colour. Many companies provide sample boards to look at, but this approach only works on new floorboards. When dealing with old floors, every one of them is completely unique because it is ageing in conditions unique to a specific room. That is why every wood floor restoration job should be treated as a one of a kind project.
Pine Floor Sealing
Wooden floor restoration work would not be complete without applying protective sealant. Whatever is done on the flooring, it needs to be protected to last for decades to come. There are main two options when it comes to wood floor finishes and they are varnishing and oiling.
Floor varnish these days is the finish that requires the least maintenance and is the easiest to live with. It is one of these apply-and-forget finishes. Once it is down, you do not have to do anything with it. And once it wears out after years and years of usage, it needs to be sanded down back to bare wood and applied again.
Modern varnishes are very different than what most people associate with varnish. Modern products are polyurethane based (water based), they have low shine, they do not smell and they give you very natural wood colouring. Gone are the days of orange, mirror like shiny varnishes. Nobody wants that anymore and you would find that most modern floors or brand new floors you get in shops would be sealed with varnish.
The other type of finish is hard wax oil. That is a full name of a product that can be applied on wooden floors. There is a lot of misinformation out there about oil related floor finishes. Some people recommend using waxes or different kinds of oils, but these products are designed to be applied on furniture and decorative wood. Only hard wax oil is formulated to withstand foot traffic for years and it still has be to be reapplied at lease once a couple of years to prevent wear.