Sanding & Staining Ground Floor Floorboards

At long last i'm finally back up and running with plenty of work and related updates on the house.

A real headache I encountered was the sourcing of suitably short, 40mm brad nails for the reclaimed Victorian floorboards on the ground floor. Virtually all brads are 50mm or larger, so I had to manually chop 1000 50mm nails down to size so that they didn't run the risk of running too deep and puncturing the underfloor heating system. 150 nails took about 10 minutes with a set of bolt cutters, which wasn't too bad.

Once nailed down, the sanding could begin.

The sanding of the boards started last week, I gave Martin a call, my expert floor guy who previously sanded and stained the top floor bathroom. He had a terrible time continuously punching the nails back down as the vibration or the machine, coupled with irregularities in the boards and a poor grip on the battens beneath resulted in many of the nails rising upwards.

Moving on to the second day:

Often Martin would switch to sanding the boards by hand with an orbital sander as the nails were causing so much grief:

All done:

The first coat of stain, with no varnish:

The following day the floor was varnished with a matt-finish product. This is when it was still wet:

Fully dry and completed:

The contrast between the original boards in the hallway and the reclaimed kitchen boards:

Constant switching between different cameras at different stages of the day produces a different shade in some of the photographs. The floor is less orange and more brown in person.

In preparation for the kitchen installation, I protected the floor with office carpet tiles and timber sheets: