Oasis academy had three large halls that had a combined total m2 of 1228m2. They were the sports hall, dance hall and the main hall. We first started on the sports hall, this was to be cleaned, neutralized and finished with a 2 component sports finish, this is used when you have a sprung floor and allows for the seal to move, if you was to use any other finish you would notice something we call ‘snap marks’.
We would have normally etched this floor to remove the top surface layer but the painted sports lines and been applied on the last coat off seal and nothing was protecting them, so we agreed to clean and neutralize this floor instead.
A few weeks before we arrived on site we checked to see if the finish we was going to use would adhere to the floor as there was no history as to what the previous contractor had used on the floor. We cleaned and neutralized a small area then applied finish, we then do a cross hatch adhesion test and this confirmed that the finish we chose was going to work.
There were marks left by tape on the floor that we removed and even some strange burn marks that where so deep we had to fill. We cleaned the floor with mop and a bucket then used a rotary buffer with a green pad, we then used the same process to neutralize the floor.
Our next step was to apply finish to the floor, we done this with a T-bar. The technique with this is to pour the finish on the floor and with the T-bar at a slight angle ‘snow plow’ the finish.
Once the floor was dry and cured we then applied a polish to the floor to give a more uniform appearance, a re-sand of this floor was out of the question so done what we could to get the sports hall looking as good as it could.
We then moved on to the main hall and dance hall, we had to be very cautious with our sanding sequence on this floor, even though it was beech which is a hard wood, it was an engineered board and had already been sanded before.
As you can see the boards where de-laminating away from the backing board and there was only a few ML left off this floor and a few repairs where needed to be done. We chose our sanding sequence carefully and started on 60 grit with the belt sander, this removed slight cupping and the dirt that had gotten in to the grain.
There was one area that had to have the engineered board cut out and replaced, we had to be careful cutting the board out as we knew It had under floor heating but as there was no history on the previous work done, we didn’t know where this was. When putting the board back down we masked the areas we needed to nail the board too.
Once the board was out we then fitted an exact match to the existing flooring. We then carried on with our sanding sequence and our next grit was 100 grit still on the belt sander followed by the trio on 100grit, which removed all scratches and imperfections. Once the floor was all hoovered and tacked a repeated number of times we applied our base coat, we had to apply this with a roller as the finish would not allow us to T-bar technique, if we did it would have left marks all over this floor.
Once the floor was dry we etched everything we had sealed, hoovered and tacked once again and applied our first coat of Finish, this time using the T-bar, we could now do this as the base coat has formed a barrier from the raw wood. We Repeated this till we had a perfect floor, we did also check to see we hadn’t missed anything, as you can see even on an area this big you cannot afford to not do your touch ups.
After 23 days of hard work we had completed this large project and our client was more than happy. The key to keeping this floor looking as good as it does now is all about maintenance and a yearly re-coat.
