Thread: Sealing Baltic Pine Floorboards for Property Rental

Hi Rubyaldo, Blackcat's advice is perfectly fine, albeit that new baltic boards will be so light in colour in comparison to your old boards so they will be most noticeable. Damned shame your plumber was so insensitive. I luckily have the opposite in my builder who is most careful and appreciative of the patina of old flooring, such that only those sections which were rotten we had to replace, and there we are doing this with salvaged old timber flooring.

You say he lifted them with a crowbar, so did he actually spit and wreck them or could they be say carefully trimmed and re-used ??

Re the new old boards you have managed to find, perhaps the only way is to try to stain them say using a mixture of a baltic pine stain and shellac, before sealing with whatever finish you intend using. I have previously managed to do this with a bedroom floor, where there were only a few of the original wide baltic boards remaining while the rest of the room had been refloored with radiata boards but never sealed. With careful application of stain/shellac mix over the entire floor, and thereafter using a tung oil based finish I was able to give the entire floor a uniform appearance. Its worth trying.

As to your cupped boards, personally I don't mind these, and simply have in the past just given the floor a light sanding, leaving it still basically cupped and then re-coated the floor with Tung oil finish. The tung oil will feed the timber dealing with the dryness while at the same time protecting your floor and giving it a nice appearance. Again if you wish and are really concerned you could always give it a shellac pre-treatment to further feed the dry timber.

If the cupping is so serious, the most drastic route would be perhaps to lift the floor and turn it over, before lightly sanding it and coating it with a suitable finish.

I am a great believer in keeping the original floors in place rather than ripping them up and replacing or sanding the crap out of them, to get rid of some cupping. If you go to that extent one might as well replace the floor and I kind of think this is not what you wish to do. Goodluck. Dave

Glad to hear you got a good result going down that road. As you can see from the photo, mine is all going just inside the door. The new replacement door has been swung on the opposite wall to the previous door, so the worst worn boards are actually on the right hand side in this photo (where there are still a couple of boards missing cos I didn't have enough ). You can barely see traces of the old japanning on the left hand side of the hall (it is missing at the doorways as that has worn off over time). The layers of plaster left by the plasterers does little to improve the quality of the image - sorry.

I propose to add japanning (pseudo-japanning using stains) on the end boards, and continue it along both sides of the hall, finishing off the balance with some sort of oil finish (tung oil is beginning to sound very attractive now I have looked into other options...). There will be a hall runner down the middle of the hall (a loose carpet, not fitted) so that will cover both the join in the boards and also the change of colour (that's the way they did it back then). At the other end I will also stain the boards the same depth and run a light cut across the grain to stop the stain bleeding into the unstained area.

Before I do any of that, of course, I have to remove several generations of grime with systematic scrubbing, sweeping and goodness knows what other methods.

In case anyone has thoughts about my housework standards - I am not currently living in the house!

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