Finishing Floors. Until within recent years, very little thought was given to finishing the floors of a dwelling-house. It was taken for granted that they would be covered with carpet or painted. As people began to appreciate that carpets, which could not be frequently taken up and cleaned, were at best unsanitary things and gathering places for moths as well as microbes, a decided sentiment set in for rugs; and with these came the demand for hardwood floors, or at least for floors which could be left bare, if occasion required.
The good points of hardwood floors are so evident that nowadays they are demanded by everybody, and the use of rugs has become so general that it has been necessary to devise some means for finishing floors that would stand hard service without the necessity for constant polishing.
The first thing necessary in order to obtain a good job of floor finishing, is to get a perfectly smooth surface. Until recently the only way to do this was the tedious, back-breaking method of planing and scraping, the latter being done usually with the edge of a freshly cut piece of glass. When the cutting edge wears down, a fresh piece must be taken. Sandpaper, bent over a flat wooden block, is also used to cut down any roughnesses or raised grain. Steel wool is preferable for this purpose on account of the greater rapidity with which it- cuts. While this method is still very generally practiced, modern invention has come to the aid of the floor fin isher and has produced a planing machine that is pushed across the floor like a lawn mower.
The first operation is filling the wood. Oak and other open-grained woods require filling with a paste filler; and while many painters laugh at the idea of a paste filler upon such woods as yellow pine and maple, experienced floor finishers say that a better job can be done by using paste filler as a surfacer. The method of using is to apply the filler to a strip, say six or eight boards wide, running the entire length of the room. Use a short, stiff brush, and apply across the grain. By the time this strip has been completed, the filler will probably have set suf ficiently to rub. It must not be rubbed before setting, or it will be rubbed off the wood; nor must it be allowed to set too hard, or it will be impossible to rub it at all or even to scrape off the filler. When the strip has set just enough, it must be rubbed well into the grain of the wood with burlaps, always rubbing across the grain of the wood. After the filler has been thor oughly rubbed, any surplus material must be carefully wiped off with a soft rag. Before any thing further can be done, the filler must be given time to dry—not less than twenty-four hours, and preferably two days.
If the natural color of the floor boards is not satisfactory they should be stained before fill ing, and the filler should be colored with. pig ment ground in oil to bring it to the same color tone.
If there are cracks or nail-holes in the floor, they must next be filled, in order to make a smooth and perfectly uniform surface. This filling may be done by using a pure whiting and linseed oil putty, tinted to match the floor boards; or it may be done better with a whiting and white lead putty made by mixing one part of white lead in oil with two or three parts of bolted whiting and enough coach varnish to make a stiff paste. This putty will resist mois ture; and when dry and hard, it may be sand papered or rubbed. For large cracks an excel lent unshrinkable putty can be made by soaking blotting paper in boiling water until it forms a pulp, then mixing it with glue dissolved in water. To this, bolted whiting is added in suf ficient quantities to make a fairly stiff paste, and thoroughly kneaded. This paste must be pressed into the cracks and smoothed off with a putty knife.
For those who do not care to make their own putty, there are excellent prepared crack-fillers on the market.
Some painters advocate the application of the was directly upon the paste filler, but the best practice is first to give one or two thin coats of pure shellac varnish. Where a slight darkening of the tone of the wood is no objec tion, orange or brown shellac is preferable to the bleached, since it is stronger. Shellac should be cut with grain alcohol and not with wood alco hol. It is especially adapted where a hard and quick-drying undercoat is required. On a close grained wood where a paste filler has not been used, either a thin coat of a first-class liquid filler, or a coat of one part of linseed oil to which from five to ten parts of turpentine have been added, should be given before.applying the shel lac. Unless there is an undercoating of some kind, it is very difficult to apply the shellac so that it does not show laps. Even then it re quires skill and rapidity of work. In shellacking a floor the plan of following down a space one or two boards wide should always be followed. The shellac coat should be put on before the oil or liquid filler coat is absolutely dry.