While I love my creative projects, I also truly enjoy the challenge of my unique specialty painting repair projects!
One of my recent challenges was to fix a floor that had recently been refinished. In the process of finishing the stairs, certain sections of the landing did not accept the stain and the floor was then polyurethaned – leaving spots that looked worn, but actually had a poly coat on top of them. The best fix would be to re-sand the floor all the way down to bare wood and start over – BUT, the problem was that the flooring was actually plywood in this area, so it was not an option to sand it any further as it would have taken off the veneer!
Rather than ripping up the old floor and starting over, I was called in to work “magic”!
Since there was polyurethane over the worn spots, re-staining was not an option. Instead, I used acrylic paints to tint polyurethane and put my tinted poly over the existing finish. My favorite part of things like this is matching the color – so once I had a great match, I was on to carefully addressing the patches.
In doing this, the biggest challenge is overlap. While you want the tinted poly over the worn areas, you DON’T want it to touch the existing stained areas – as that would just make those areas darker and create a dark outline around the fixed spot. This meant using my finest brushes in some areas, but also meant I needed to blend the edges in other areas – using everything from water to my fingers to make the blend seamless.
To get the depth of the color correct, I needed to let my poly dry and then do a second coat – following the same process as I did for the first coat.
Finally, I wanted to make sure the shininess of the finish was consistent – so when my second coat was dry, I re-poly’d the entire section. The original floor had a matte finish, so I also used a matte poly – BUT, as it turned out, my matte poly was slightly shinier than what was originally used. To address this, I waited for my poly to dry and I then rubbed it gently with super-fine steel wool to cut the sheen slightly.
In the end, I got both the color and the sheen to match – and the client was thrilled to avoid the costs of replacing the floor!
Below are some before and after pictures —
Before
After
Before
After
Enjoy,
Jason