Before the works

On our first visit to this primary school in East Sheen we found a wonderful 22 mm beech Junckers flooring in desparate need of restoration, which had also suffered an expansion that was causing buckling in the middle of the area on regular basis.

Later on during the works we confirmed that the source of the expansion is due to moisture coming from the entrance area, during wetter weather periods.

How we did it...

Prior to planned floor works our team protected all exits and the curtains with polythene sheets. We also created an expansion gap in the middle of the areas, to allow the floors to settle down. This expansion cut was not final, as we expected that the floors may need more time to react and that while working on stripping the floors, we may expose the timber more to the source of the moisture.

Moisture readings from the Junckers flooring were collected from entire perimeter and location around the main entrance doors indicated up to 16% of moisture content. During the next few days of our stay in the school some of our further reading reached 18%. This is well beyond the threshold of 12% and it was clear this area takes moisture levels from incoming traffic during wet periods.

Like many other Junckers beech floors, this one was laid as floating with Junckers clips system, which would allow the floors easily to expand and therefore cause a "bubble" in the middle of the area.

The floating installation was also a reason to avoid gap filling service on the floors, which we would usually recommend solid wood flooring with heavy use.

We therefore did a secondary cut after the restoration works, allowing a 20 mm expansion gap and installed a 100 mm heavy-duty aluminium cover strip with fixings on the moving side only. In this way we could allow a movement in the floors, without being noticable.

The floor sanding for these hardwood floors started with 16 grit sanding paper - very coarse grid, which paves the way to a perfect leveled for some uneven wooden floors. We then followed through the full set of grits up to 100 grit to make sure we get a perfect preparation for Junckers Prelak and 4 new coats of Junckers HP Commercial lacquer in UltraMatt sheen.