Ask Mr Sanders

Hi Richard,

There are 3 standards of thickness in engineered wood flooring - 20 mm, 18 mm and 14/15 mm. Each of those will have different thickness of top layer (oak, walnut, beech, maple, etc), which will vary between 3 mm and 6 mm.

Every time engineered wood floors are sanded approx. 1 mm will be removed by the restoration itself, however another 1 mm should be allowed for difference factory defect difference and the level of the floor throughout.

So, technically - 3 mm top layered floor can be sanded only once and a 6 mm top layer, should be able to achive 3 or even 4 restorations.

Hi and thank you for your question about the use of commercial grade floor lacquer 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 lacquer 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 Lacquers 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.

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 part of our wood floor restoration services. It is common for gaps to appear between the floorboards or between the parquet blocks over time. The 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 should be noted that bigger gaps are trickier to fill. This is where strip filling comes to help.

Strip filling uses small pine slivers between the floorboards and goes together with resin & saw dust filler. While this is often an effective method, it is not ideal solution for larger areas as it can spoil the look of the timber floors.

Important note for both gap filling methods is that they are dependant on the solidness of the floorboards. Stability of both depends on absence of movement in the floorboards or in the joists that hold the floorboards. Therefore, gap filling for floorboards is excluded from the service guarantee of flooring companies.

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, 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 3-strip engineered wood flooring.

The 3-strip engineered floorings come with 3 mm 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.