Another century old floor in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. This one had multiple layers of wax and paint, with some old carpet pad fused on top for good measure. While these things are nasty to sand off, the upshot is that they do a pretty good job of protecting the wood over the years—I’m always surprised at how nice the wood looks once the paint comes off.
I started by grinding off everything I could reach with the big machine sporting a gravelly 16 grit belts. Sandpaper at that grit is basically just small rocks, and it makes the sander sound mean. As you can see though, it cuts through paint and wax pretty quick.
Everything I couldn’t reach with the machine had to be edged off with 12 grit. The discs load up faster with the wax so it’s necessary to use an even lower grit than on the machine. The chunks that come off are so big that the dust pickup systems can’t really grab them, so there is a decent amount of sweeping involved to clean up
Once the crud is removed, it can be attacked like any other floor. I ran a pass with 50 grit on both the machine and edger, filled the gaps, then fine sanded with 100 grit, and buffed with a 100 grit screen to bring the floor to an even complexion. Once I got the first coat of waterborne finish on, the wood really came to life!
