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Stripping
Hardwood
Floors
As
hardwood floors wear off with
the passing of age, you’ll notice they lose their shine,
texture and the color
intensity of their finishing coating. Fortunately, getting the old
looks back
to your hardwood floor can be done without having to replace the actual
hardwood.
Simply stripping hardwood floors of their old
coating and replacing it with a new one can do the trick and
it’s one of the
most common techniques used by today’s do it yourself
installers.
It’s inevitable that, at some
point, you will want to compare stripping vs sanding hardwood floors.
Admittedly, sanding is a more complete process, it has beneficial
effects that
last longer and it’s definitely a better quality choice than
stripping.
However, you will also have to
consider the downsides: sanding is a lot more time consuming than
stripping and
it causes more mess in your house, which makes it more of a nuisance
than
anything else for many people.
In addition, sanding requires a
lot of tools that can be hard to get or they could cost more than you
would
want to spend simply to give your hardwood floor a new shine.
Stripping
on the
other hand is quite cheap in comparison, you can finish stripping your
hardwood
floors in a matter of days and the clean up process won’t be
as tough either.
Stuff You’ll Need for Staining Hardwood Floors
- a thick, synthetic stripping pad
- a wide scraper
- stripping solution
- a wide putty knife
- clean absorbent rags
- a large wide paint brush
How to Strip Hardwood Floors
If
this is the first time you’re
stripping a hardwood floor, it’s best if you start out by
testing on a smaller
area, somewhere in a corner. Here’s how you should do it:
- Pour the stripping solution on the floor area and
smudge it across it evenly with the brush.
- Wait for around 30 minutes (this is an approximate
time that depends on the type of coating your floor has and on the type
of stripping solution you use).
- Start scraping the finish coating – if you
waited long enough, it should peel off with ease.
- Use a wet rag to scrub off any excess solution that
you couldn’t get off.
- Wipe dry the area that you just stripped, so that the
water doesn’t get sucked in the wood, causing it to expand.
Why did you go with stripping instead of sanding?
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Stripping and Sanding
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I've only refinished floors in 2 houses, so I'm pretty new to this. In the first house we rented a big drum sander, and it took at least 30 hours (for ...
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