Today we hired a floor sander to sand the floorboards in the 1st bedroom. We hired it from a shop called Castorama which is a bit like B&Q only they speak better English at Castorama.
The machine is a million times better than the ones we’ve hired in the past, in the UK. The sanding bands are already joined together in an oval shape so there is none of this coaxing them into shape for hours, so that they don’t explode when the hit the floor. Then all you do is pull a lever, slip the band on and then pull the lever back again to tighten it. It also has another lever to enable you to lower it to the floor at the right speed, another problem that made the bands burst. To start it, you turn the switch clockwise, wait for it to get up to speed and then let go. The only problem was that if you didn’t let it get up to speed it would blow the fuse in your fuse box so all the sockets in that area stopped working. We realised this after blowing 3! The next stage is the varnishing, please don’t let it need 20 coats! I’ve been trying to get the paint off a small cast iron bath for about a month now. It was one of my ebay purchases/bargains, £2.20, can’t be bad. The thing is, I need to get the paint off so I can resurface it, I’m not sure why it’s been painted but anyway it has. I’ve been using a normal, run-of-the-mill paint stripper, which got off most of it, but about a third of it would not budge. Today we went to a little hardware store in our nearest town – St. Leonard de Noblat – and asked for some decapaint. The man then went into a padlocked cupboard and got out a white tin. He then asked for our name and address as it was very toxic and that was the law. We got it home and as Andy was pouring it into a container, I mentioned that it was probably just something like meths. "No it’s not," he shouted, as he had tilted the tin back to horizontal and small amount had dripped down the side of it and burnt off the paint in an instant! Well it worked on the bath too. I’m so pleased now, I wish I had that a month ago. Oh well, you live and learn.
Getting the desired results in floor sanding is not easy; the company doing the job needs to have experience and skill to achieve results.
Posted by: floor polishing | December 01, 2010 at 08:13 AM
Perhaps the paint stripper was saliva from the creature in "Alien"? Sounds like it!!
Posted by: Maria Davies | August 27, 2005 at 03:37 PM