Dining Room Dreaded Black Mastic

When you are ripping things up and out of an old house, you just never know what you may find.  We had a good hunch that the entire house had hardwood floors, but what we didn't know is what exactly we would have to do to restore them.

When we began ripping up the tile in the dining room we found this somewhat thick layer of black mastic directly on the hardwood.  After a lot of internet research and a failed attempt with heat guns, I tried applying some citrus mastic remover.  After hours and hours of hand-scraping a small area, I had made minimal progress.  The next thing I tried is when I had the square buffer sander for the upstairs floors, I decided to try it out on the black floors here.  Didn't work.  The sand pad became immediately gunked up -- heat + friction = no sanding off glue.

As the days passed and we made great progress on lots of other projects, we began to fret about this one -- how the hell were we going to get this black stuff off the floors.  I called a couple of professional companies and they were not interested in doing the work -- for one, they wanted to sell me engineered hardwood instead; and two, they were afraid of doing more damage to the floors.

Then Mike came up with a great plan to use mineral spirits.  These are strong, but not as strong as some of the other products out there.  So we ventilated the room well, taped it off from the rest of the house, and then Mike spent two nights (up all night kinda nights) scraping the mastic off after it soaked in mineral spirits.

After as much of the mastic was scraped off as we could, I went over to Home Depot to talk to my tool rental guy.  I had my heart set on getting the random orbital floor sander (it has three sanding discs on the bottom), but there were none left.  He only had square buff sanders (way too weak for this job) or the feared drum sander.  I showed him the pictures and he was pretty skeptical that any sander could fix the floors, but he convinced me to go with the drum sander.

Working with the drum sander was a lot like the first time I rode a roller coaster -- at first I was terrified, and then I was completely thrilled!  When used properly and carefully, a drum sander can be your best friend.  However, if you're not paying attention, it would take literally 10 seconds to screw up the floors completely.

The drum sander is exactly what we needed for this job.  It didn't make it simple -- I still changed the sandpaper at least 10 times because it kept getting gunked.  But the drum sander is what got us down to the original wood.

Here are the floors after polyurethane -- we decided not to stain any of the floors because just the natural hue with poly looks amazing.  Also, if you look closely, you can see that in a few spots there is a little haunting black mark -- these floors will never look like pristine brand new hardwood.  But the great thing is that they are original to the house and we worked our asses off to restore them!