Before the works

This beautiful ground floor in a house in Putney, SouthWest London was originally fitted with a dark-grey oiled engineered parquet flooring blocks throughout over underfloor heating.

The floors had a dark and quite dry feeling from the use of the undefloor heating through the years and the lack of proper maintenance. The new owners of the property wanted to go away from the dark tone and add more spacious colour balance instead through staining the floors.

To achieve this, they wanted to switch colour to a whitewashed nordic style finish.

How we did it...

After sanding the parquet flooring, we have applied a number of samples on the floors, for the client to choose from.

A classic way to achieve a whitewash finish on wooden floors is through application of one more coats of white tinted primer. In the case the client selected two coats of Bona White primer, followed by 2 more coats of Bona Mega Matt lacquer.

An important detail in this parquet floor restoration project was that the engineered block had only 3 mm top layer and quite deep groove around it. After the sanding some of the groove would remain and respectively the previous dark colour will remain in the groove.

To reduce the effect of the dark colour in the groove we recommended application of gap filling throughout. Gap filling with sawdust collected during the sanding will take the colour of the oak timber and soften and even remove the prominence of the previous dark groove.