Hardwood Refinishing near you

HSE is direct about the health effects. Wood dust can cause asthma, and carpenters and joiners are four times more likely to get it than other UK workers; hardwood dust can also cause cancer, particularly of the nose. The workplace exposure limit for hardwood dust is 3mg/m3 based on an 8-hour time-weighted average, and for softwood dust it is 5mg/m3 on the same basis. Where the two are mixed, the hardwood limit of 3mg/m3 applies to all the wood dust in the mixture. HSE's EH40/2005 list of workplace exposure limits reduced the hardwood figure as part of a set of changes that came into force on 17 January 2020, and carries it with both a carcinogen and a sensitiser notation.

The reason this bears on a domestic floor rather than a factory is in EH40's own explanation of the entry: dust is generated by machining and working wood and wood-containing materials, and while sawing, turning and routing produce relatively coarse dust, sanding and assembly operations generate fine dust. A floor sander is a sanding machine the size of a lawnmower, run for a day in a closed room. HSE's construction dust information sheet, CIS36, names wood dust as one of the three main construction dusts alongside silica and general dust, and sets out the duty under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 as three steps: assess the risks, control them, and review the controls.

What that looks like on site is checkable without any technical knowledge. The machine should be connected to an extraction unit of the correct class rather than to a general commercial vacuum, the edger should be extracted too, the room should be sealed off from the rest of the house and the debris should not be swept up dry. Ask what happens to the bags, ask whether anyone will be wearing respiratory protection during the heaviest passes, and ask to be out of the house for the sanding days. None of this is unusual for a contractor who does this work properly.

Two families of finish dominate, and they fail and repair in opposite ways. A water-based lacquer builds a film on top of the timber. It is hard, it resists spills, and when it wears through it wears through in a line you can see across a doorway; repairing it means abrading and recoating an area at minimum. A hardwax oil soaks in and sits closer to the wood. It marks more easily, it needs refreshing on a schedule, but a worn patch can be cleaned, re-oiled and blended by hand without touching the rest of the room, which is why it suits a floor in a busy house where nobody wants a full refinish again for a decade.

Stain is the decision to take slowly. Colour applied to bare timber goes into the wood, so changing your mind means sanding again and losing another slice of a finite thickness. Species react differently to the same product, an old floor with patched boards will not take colour evenly, and a sample panel in the actual room under the actual light is worth more than any brochure. Ask for one, and look at it in the evening as well as at midday, because a floor that reads as warm oak at noon can read as orange under a lamp.

A solid board can be sanded until the cut reaches the tongue or the fixings, and that distance, not the age of the floor, is what limits it. The honest way to find out is to lift a board at a threshold or in a cupboard and measure, or to take a reading at a floor vent. Old pine floorboards are often thick enough to have plenty left even after a century, while a board that has already been machine-sanded twice in living memory may only have a screen-and-recoat in it. A contractor who measures before quoting is telling you something useful; one who promises a full sand without looking is guessing.

Engineered boards are a different calculation entirely and are covered in their own guide, because there what matters is the wear layer above the core rather than the board thickness. Either way, the practical advice is the same: do not use up the floor's remaining life on cosmetic marks. Recoat while the film is still intact, deal with the traffic routes before they go through, and keep the full sand for the moment when the floor genuinely needs it.

Refinishing is priced on how many passes the floor needs, how much of it a machine can reach and how long the finish takes to build. The things that move a quotation are the area and how broken up it is, the number of passes the existing surface demands, how much edging and corner work there is against fitted units and fireplaces, whether stairs are included, whether boards need lifting, turning or replacing first, whether the floor is being stained, how many coats of what finish are specified, and whether the house will be empty while it cures. Two quotes for the same room can differ honestly because one includes three coats and the other two.

LokalMatch is only the introduction. Set the job out once with your postcode — the rooms, the species if you know it, what the floor has been through and whether you want it stained — and floor sanding pros working in your area come back to you. Using LokalMatch costs a homeowner nothing; the pros pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not sand floors, does not set prices and does not vet, rank or recommend anyone who replies, so comparing the number of coats, the dust control and the cure time is work that stays with you.