I want to repair an area of about a square yard in a room floored with engineered-wood flooring. It has been damaged by hard casters on a chair (which I'll be replacing with softer rubberized ones).


In the damaged area, the coating on the flooring has been smashed up, but not deeply. Initial experimentation with my sander suggests that I can just sand down the affected area and apply the Varathane per the manufacturer's instrux.

Question, for anyone who has done this before: how do we deal with the edges of the damaged area? Do we need to do anything special for the newly-applied Varathane to 'marry' seamlessly with the existing coating surrounding the application area?

Thanks,

 

Varathane is a brand name. What Varathane product are you using? You need a stain to match the color, and a floor polyurethane to protect the finish. And you won't get very good results just doing a limited area. Its probably going to look like a splotch. Floors typically need to have an entire room sanded down if you don't want it to look like a patchy repair. Course it will probably look better than it did no matter what. Just not perfect.

 

The voice of experience – thank you. I was afraid that the answer was going to be what you say, but I had to ask. I couldn't see any way to 'blend' the new (liquid) Varathane / polyurethane sealant around the edges with the existing, cured sealant. Maybe i hoped it would just 'flow', but I'm not surprised to be disappointed. We'll see.

The Varathane I was considering using was this or similar, sorry, I shouldn't have assumed it was obvious from the context: https://www.rustoleum.com/en/product-catalog/consumer-brands/varathane/premium-floor-finish?ls=214550&lc=Gloss%20Low%20VOC.

It's not practical, of course, to resurface a whole room's floor for the ~8sqft of damage, but your answer was still helpful. I now have a Plan B, to avoid the patch effect I mentioned, what you called "splotch".

Thank you for your help.

 

IF you can sand and refinish individual boards the new finish won't show much although sanding one board and not the one next to it is easier said than done.

 

Mark, That's the conclusion to which I came, too – good to hear someone else thinks the same way. I've never owned or used a belt sander; thought about borrowing or renting one (my boards are 5 inches wide), because of the straight edge of the belt, but the more I think about it, the downward pressure at the edge of the belt may not be consistent. I think I'll use my trusty little palm sander – more work, but at the end of the day...

The other issue is that while it should be straightforward (if tedious) to sand within the edges of individual boards, I have several boards that have, say, one foot or two feet in the damaged area but seven or eight feet outside it. It would be frustrating to sand down the 75% of several boards that don't need it – it would multiply the size of the job fourfold, and it's going to be tedious work.

I think I'll just have to sand something like straight cross-lines and see how the joins turn out. I'm actually less worried about the immediate esthetics than I am that the meeting 'seams' between the old and new coating (Varathane) will not fuse, so the coating will break apart and just fail.

We'll see.

Thanks!

 

Regardless of what you do you probably need to look into a floor pad for the chair, they make some really nice glass pads which look a lot better than the cheap plastic pieces!