Pine & Softwood Floor Sanding

Which pine you probably have

Baltic pine came out of Europe as ballast and flooring in the nineteenth and early twentieth century: narrow boards, close growth rings, honey coloured, usually with plenty of nail holes. Hoop pine is the Queensland softwood, paler and finer with barely any figure. Radiata is the modern plantation timber, softer again, common in later additions.

Cypress pine is technically a softwood too but behaves differently enough that we treat it separately.

Sanding soft timber without wrecking it

Softwood has hard latewood rings and soft earlywood between them. Push a drum sander too hard and it will cut the soft bands deeper than the hard ones, leaving a washboard surface you can feel underfoot and see in raking light. It is the single most common fault in DIY pine floors.

The answer is lighter passes, sharper abrasive, a full grit sequence and never dwelling in one spot. Old pine also nearly always needs its nails punched below the surface first, because a proud nail head will destroy a sheet of paper and score the floor as it goes.

Gaps, and what to do about them

Century-old pine floors have gaps. Sometimes a lot of them. Fine gaps can be filled with a slurry of the floor's own sanding dust and a binder, which colour matches perfectly. Wider gaps are better filled with slivers of matching timber cut and glued in, which will not fall out when the boards move next summer.

We will always tell you which approach a floor needs. Slurry-filling a wide gap looks fine for six months and then cracks out.

Finishes for pine

Pine yellows naturally with age and light, so a solvent polyurethane on top of that will take an old baltic floor quite orange. Most owners now go water-based to keep it honey rather than amber, or limewash it to cool it right down.

A satin sheen suits pine better than gloss: the surface of an old softwood floor is never dead flat, and gloss will show every wave.