Nethern on Hill Recreational Hall, formerly known as Nerthern Hospital, Hooley, Surrey
The wooden floors at Nethern on Hill dated back to 1905, when it was originally founded as an asylum. Over the years the surrounding buildings where demolished and re built as houses. One of the last originally buildings at Nethern on hill was the recreational hall, which we had the privilege to restore back to its former glory.
The original wooden floor was strip walnut, that is quite rare to find now days. A few years before they had major flooding and both sides of the recreational hall had to be lifted up and because strip walnut is hard to source they settled for strip pine.
Another amazing feature of this hall is that it actually has maple inlaid into the floor as a badminton court, the craftsmanship that this took is very impressive even with today’s technology and machines let alone over 100 years ago.
So we started our sanding process with a 50 grit to remove the old finish and flatten the floor, this took around 2 days to do, we had to be careful not to scratch the walnut to much that is why we used a 50 grit.
We followed the 50 grit sanding process with 80 grit, the edges had to be sanded with a extremely rough 24 grit to remove the horrible varnish left by the previous contractor, as the sides are pine they clog up the sand paper very quick so this took some time to get to floor smooth a scratch free.
We then moved on to the next stage which was bringing out the lagler trio, this is an amazing machine, it gets the floor as flat as can be and removes the scratch pattern till its no existent. The floor was sanded all the way up to 120 grit, along us to move on to our next stage, the base coat!
We decided to roller on the first coat, this took us a very long time but was worth it in the end, we had to control the room temperature as in the name this is situated on a hill, we done this by turning on certain heaters.
Once the base coat was dry we etched the whole floor, hovered and tacked.
The management company ‘Stiles Harold Williams’ wanted us to install 3 more badminton courts. They decided they wanted have them in yellow so they didn’t clash with the original maple that appears as white. Once all three courts where masked out we painted the lines and removed the tape was we went to stop the paint from bleeding or peeling.
The whole floor was then finished with three more coats and now looks as beautiful as it did the day it was installed over 100 years ago. We look forward to maintaining this floor yearly too keep it looking as good as it can be.
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