Our disaster of hiring a floor sander in Norwich

After moving into our lovely Victorian terrace house in Norwich, we ripped out the threadbare carpets to discover pine wooden floorboards everywhere which we decided to hire floor sander for. The carpets were full of fleas from previous owner and after spending some time abroad I realised that it’s only really England that are in love with carpets and I now have a hatred of them. Awful for asthmatics, breeding ground for fleas etc and impossible to keep clean.

So we decided to save some money and hire a floor sander from a local floor sanding hire place in Norwich. All good so far! We did a little research on which grit sandpaper to start with… thinking 40 grit to get the paint off and work down to 120 grit sandpaper. The local hire place was only a little slightly more for a ‘dust-free’ floor sander! Which sounded amazing. Picked it up from the hire place, got it home and ready to go around 10.30am. After one length of the sanding the floor, we could tell there was something very wrong! The bags they supplied didn’t fit our machine. A tweet or six later on social media, we have the floor sander back in the car and replaced it with a normal floor sander as hire place were out of bags to match that machine!

Taped on dust-free bags as suggested after first couple of tweets on social media.

40 grit will also do this to your solid wooden floor with hired floor sander.

The mess was awful from the drum sander, just bloody awful and also set us back by 2 hours. We only hired the machine for one day as anymore didn’t make it cheaper than hiring a the professionals in. I can honestly say I would never hire a floor sander again or attempt to do it ourselves. It’s a lot more complex than Google makes out. For the following reasons:

1. The sandpaper rips extremely easily on any slightly raised nail or imperfection in the floor and it’s not easy to change the paper in those machines.
2. Hire places will argue over dust collecting bag making you doubt yourself.
3. The edging sander will burn all the edge of your floor, if you even pause for a second. Which means you end up using your own mouse sander, which will takes hours and hours.
4. Near impossible to complete floor sanding in one day.
5. Extremely stressful and you will without doubt fall out with whoever is helping you

However if after reading this you are feeling brave. I would check the floor sanding equipment from the hire place carefully and buy a proper mask. Don’t try and use the cheap ones from DIY shops. There are some good masks at screwfit for this. Personally I would hire a professional.

Guest blog by Elizabeth Smith