Boxes - Flooring

 Hopefully this will be a very short and simple 'how I do floors' post.

I have always used this lovely real wood flooring - used be under a Houseworks label but as you can see here this seems to be just a generic .'made in China'  label.  The floorboards are in perfect scale for many historical periods and the walnut colour is lovely against traditional furniture.

I have always used a B & Q quick dry satin varnish (water clean up) but it seems to have changed its form and the new version gets pretty rubbish reviews so I switched to this one It was cheaper too, so far so good.

Luckily as I have done this for years there was no panic when the whole thing decided to curl up after the first coat.  I usually leave overnight to dry and then weigh down the next day until I am ready for second coating, then repeat.

For finishing a painted or varnished surface you need the absolute finest sanding material you can find.  Here's three of mine - a four hundred sandpaper, a painter or plasterers sponge, nail 'buffer'.  Any one of these will do the job.  I favour the painters/plasterers sponge.

After light sanding and its second coat and flattening process it should have been a simple matter of using double sided sticky tape to put the floor in the box as I have always done with my shops and houses.  Cardboard strikes again.

It proved impossible to remove the protective 'paper' from the tape. Once it was stuck down the cardboard sucked it up and there was no leeway to pick off the top layer to reveal the other glue side.  All that happened time and again was the whole tape came up. glue and all.  Never mind, thinks I, I will try the magic spray glue that I had just bought.  Never made the slightest difference.  I would like to think that it was the waxy backing on the wood flooring that was the problem here but I am seriously concerned about using this glue for the wallpaper as planned  because I couldn't discern a glimmer of tackiness where it went down.

Third and finally, out came good old UHU.  So far so good.

I really wouldn't recommend porous cardboard of any kind for room boxes for sure.  

I am about to investigate what kit we would need to hire to cut thin MDF into perfectly rectangular pieces of wood.  Would gluing them together be enough?  The house kits I have used are usually grooved to take the walls and keep them square to the base etc.  Much trawling the web tonight, methinks