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Before & After, Home Improvement

Walking The Plank

13/03/2013

Sanding Floorboards

It’s been done for a while now, so it’s high time that we share the details of our living room floor restoration with you. It’s one of favourite makeovers so far and made an unbelievable difference to the whole room.

One of the first things we did when moving in was to remove the smelly, dirty and dog pee stained carpet. It was too disgusting for words!

Sanding Floorboards

Straight away we knew that we’d like to keep the original exposed floorboards and luckily the condition of them, if even dirty and stained, was actually quite good.

Before we could even think about sanding the floor, we had to get some of the major building work out of the way – we had the electrics sorted, the radiator replaced, a new fireplace fitted and, as you can see in the picture, the whole room replastered.

Sanding Floorboards

Then we could finally tackle the floor. As you all know we like to tackle as many projects as possible ourselves, this is one of the few ones we decided to pay to have done.

We could have probably done it ourselves, but after working out the costs and getting some quotes from a few local floor sanding companies, we were really surprised to find that paying someone to sand the floor was only slightly more expensive than doing it ourselves.
In the end the company we chose did a great job and it was amazing to watch the quick transformation. After just a few minutes of work, this is what our floor already looked like.

Sanding Floorboards

What a difference sanding floorboards can make! It probably would have taken us a whole weekend to do the work ourselves but our contractor finished the job in just a few hours.

Sanding Floorboards

The difference is amazing. It’s hard to believe that it’s the same floor!

Sanding Floorboards

All in all it cost about £15/m² including all sanding and varnishing. If we’d wanted to have the floor stained, it would have worked out at slightly more. In general the costs will obviously depend on the condition of your floor and also on area where you live.

This is what our living room is like now.

Grey and Blue Living Room

We love the floor and it’s holding up really well. There are a few little marks and dents here and there, but nothing major. We also found an amazing way to remove dents in wood. You can read about how to do it here.

We’d like to eventually sand all the floors in the house. Do you also have wooden floors? Should we have the exposed wooden floors everywhere or should we have carpet in some of the rooms?

by Christine 
5 Comments

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previous article: What Would You Do?
next article: The Butterfly Effect

Comments

  1. Magali@TheLittleWhiteHouse says: 13/03/2013 at 13:39

    I love wooden floor. I have some upstairs under layers and layers of linoleum and plywood… It’s my dream one day to allow them to see the day light! I wood uncover every wooden floor possible if I were you. They look so lovely in your living-room.

    Reply
    • Christine says: 13/03/2013 at 15:25

      Thanks Magali! I love the wooden floors, you should definitely try to restore yours, too! The original floorboard are under the laminate flooring in the hallway, too – I can’t tell you how tempted I am to just rip up the laminate and start restoring the floor!
      Cx

      Reply
  2. rosie says: 03/07/2013 at 12:49

    Hi, I found your blog whilst researching how easily we can strip the floorboards in our house. I wondered if you have any problems with draught / cold? Is the downstairs cold from the ground cavity? Are your upstairs rooms colder than before? I doubt we have insulation beneath the floorboards. We have horrid carpets at the moment and can’t afford to carpet every room!

    Thanks for writing an amazing blog and I’ll be sure to check in for more tips :)

    Reply
    • Christine says: 03/07/2013 at 14:08

      Hi Rosie! Let’s start at the beginning ;-). First of all, it’s fairly easy to sand floorboards, but it is really hard work! You can see our budget breakdown and how we did it here: https://www.littlehouseonthecorner.com/how-to-sand-floorboards/. Our upstairs rooms aren’t colder than before, but downstairs is a different matter. We’ve insulated under our floors and also sealed the gaps between the skirting and floor. It’s something that you will definitely have to do, as it will be too cold otherwise. All in all it’s actually better now than it was before. The insulation is definitely way more effective than the horrible carpet we had before. Don’t use caulk to fill the gap between your skirting and floor – it’ll crack and look awful after just a short while. This is how we did it: https://www.littlehouseonthecorner.com/gap-between-skirting-and-floor/

      Hope that’s some help! Good luck, we’d love to know how you get on!
      Cx

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Sanding Floorboards says:
    20/05/2013 at 17:32

    […] too long after moving in, we had the floor in our living room sanded (read more about it here). It looked like easy enough to do, so this time, we decided to do it ourselves. After hiring the […]

    Reply

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  • Hi to all of my lovely new followers that found their way over here from @Designsponge! So glad you’re here (& every one of my other lovely followers, too, of course!).
It’s chaos as usual around here as it seems like a completely impossible task to find a tradesperson in Berlin. Seriously - they just don’t exist. We’ve been trying to get our stained glass door repaired for a year now and noone is getting back to me!
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  • l can honestly say that I've never struggled choosing a colour as much as I did for the front door. I love the panelling we added (it was flat before) but I'm still not convinced about the yellow colour. It went from white to pale blue to the yellow colour it now is. I said I’d live with it for a while and I do like it but I don’t love it. The hallway is really dark so it only looks like this for a short part of the day and the rest of the time the yellow looks really muddy. I know that I want to update it (again!) but I’m totally paranoid that I’ll end up with another colour I don’t like! Does anyone else have trouble choosing paint colours? Or am I just making too much of a fuss? Kind of feel like I need to get a grip - it’s only a bit of paint after all! .
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