Floor Sanding & Polishing near you

There is no published figure for this, and anyone who quotes you one is guessing. What exists is a measurement: the depth of timber above the tongue on a solid board, or the thickness of the veneer above the core on an engineered board. Both can be read directly by lifting a board at a cupboard, a floor vent or a doorway, and a contractor who declines to look is deciding your floor's future on a hunch.

The practical consequence is that a floor near the end of its sanding life is not a lost cause, it is a floor that needs a lighter job. A screen and recoat takes off the old coating and a whisker of timber rather than levelling the whole surface, so it will not remove deep scratches or colour change but it will buy years and it can be repeated. Ask for it to be quoted as an alternative, because a contractor paid to sand will sand.

Engineered boards deserve their own conversation. Some are sold as sandable once, some not at all, and the veneer thickness is stated by the manufacturer rather than judged by eye. Bevelled edges complicate it further: sanding flat removes the bevel on the high boards first and leaves an uneven set of shadow lines, which is a cosmetic outcome you should agree to before the machine starts, not discover afterwards.

Queensland publishes something most homeowners never see: a Standards and Tolerances Guide, last issued in December 2023, which sets out what counts as defective work. Its floors section is the closest thing Australia has to an agreed definition of a good timber floor, and although it is a Queensland document, it is useful anywhere as a way to write a scope that can be checked.

On gaps, the guide says a floor is defective within the first twelve months if it has a gap of more than 2 mm between adjacent boards extending for more than 1 m, or gaps totalling more than 5 mm across three gaps between four consecutive boards. On levels, floor levels within a room are defective if they differ by more than 10 mm in any room or area, or more than 4 mm in any 2 m length, where that affects safe use or reasonable amenity. Nail heads detectable through a covering, or nail popping clearly visible in an exposed floor, are defects in the first twelve months.

Two exclusions matter as much as the numbers. The guide accepts that timber shrinks and swells with its moisture content, and it excludes from the gap test any area affected by sunlight, cooling, heating or other heat-generating appliances, on the basis that localised shrinkage there cannot be allowed for at the time of construction. A north-facing living room behind big glass in a Queensland summer is exactly that area, and it is why a sanding contract should say which parts of the floor the tolerances are being applied to.

The house has to be emptied, and more thoroughly than people expect. Machines need clear runs to the wall, the floor has to be walkable for several days without furniture on it, and every coat needs the room shut. Plan for the kitchen and the bathroom to be reachable by a route that is not the floor being done, or plan to be out of the house.

Dust extraction is not an extra. Modern machines run to bagged or vacuum extraction and a job done this way leaves a fine film rather than drifts, but the seal on doorways, the cupboards, the ducted air conditioning returns and the wardrobes still need taping. Ask specifically what is being sealed and who does it, because the difference between a tidy job and a house that smells of timber dust for a month is entirely in that step.

Then the coatings, which drive the timetable. Each coat needs to dry before the next, the room needs ventilation while it does, and full cure runs well past the point where the floor can be walked on. Get the contractor's own numbers for light foot traffic, for putting rugs down and for sliding furniture back, in writing, because rugs laid too early trap solvent and mark the finish permanently.

Australia licenses trades state by state, and floor sanding sits in different places. Queensland is the clearest: the QBCC has a licence class called floor finishing and covering (hard sector) whose published scope includes preparing, sanding and applying coatings to timber floors, installing and repairing cork flooring, installing and repairing mosaic and block parquetry, installing pre-finished manufactured and engineered timber flooring, and installing and repairing non-structural strip timber flooring. Incidental work of another class is allowed under a small value cap set by the QBCC.

New South Wales runs a licence check through Service NSW and requires a licence for people doing residential building work as well as for wiring, plumbing, draining, gasfitting and air conditioning or refrigeration work. Whether a particular floor sanding job needs one turns on the value and nature of the work, so the sensible move is to run the contractor's name and number through the check and ask them to tell you which class they hold and what it lets them do.

Wherever you are, insurance is the question worth pressing. Public liability matters here because the work is dusty, noisy and full of trip hazards while it runs, and statutory home warranty cover is separate again and triggered by contract value in most states. Ask for the certificate rather than the assurance.

Write the scope around observable things. Number of coats, product and sheen, which rooms, whether gaps are being filled and how, how many boards are being replaced and where the replacements come from, who lifts and refits skirting and thresholds, and who removes the old covering and its debris. Add the dates for light traffic, rugs and furniture, since those are the promises most often made verbally and forgotten.

Underneath any of that sit the consumer guarantees in the Australian Consumer Law, which the ACCC explains for services as three things: services must be carried out with acceptable care and skill, they and any resulting products must be fit for any stated purpose, and they must be supplied within a reasonable time where no time frame was agreed. Those cannot be contracted away, and they are the backstop if a floor is delivered with drum marks or a coating that fails early.

LokalMatch is where you collect the comparable quotes. Post the room count, the approximate floor area in square metres, the age of the house, what covering is on the floor now and whether it has been sanded before, and ask every quote to price a screen and recoat alongside a full sand. The gap between those two prices tells you a great deal about how the contractor has read your floor.