Lucky you - discovering a Parquet floor, this one is Pine, laid herringbone design, it has been previously sanded - not sympathetically though, you can see some chatter marks. Don't worry they will all come out - if you have it professionally sanded - Parquet is a specialist sand as the grain of the wood is not in all the same direction. It can be stained - I would reccommend a water based stain and finished in a clear matt lacquer. If you wanted to paint it white, you would need to treat all the knots with knot primer, followed by a floor primer, then a couple of coats of paint ie Farrow & Ball Personal recommendation a clear finish to highligh the knots and grain of your wood - using white accents Good Kuck - Elaine

Those are wise words Karen! am so glad it worked out for you. Love to see a photo, what colour or shade did you choose? Jools, The bitumen is a right pig, best way we found is to make it cold, so it becomes brittle, then you can scrape /chip it off. We used a window scraper, coarse wire wool and various sandpaper. We left the window open on a cold night, turned heating off in there, and you could try a cooler fan on it. Putting ice bags on it didn't work as well as we hoped. we used a round sander, but it can cause swirls, it's really awkward ! To be honest a few dips and scratches on an old floor are okay in the end, don't be too afraid of it, they are only pieces of wood stuck down on the floor, not bone china, as long as you try not to break them, or set fire to them, otherwise you can't possibly do more damage than I did, and they recovered!

Hi Barney, That sounds fab and I'm sure it will look beautiful. Just a quick comment on parquet / herringbone tiles after some recent experience on our renovation project, you probably know this already but I didn't and it ended up as quite an expensive learning for us; cutting tiles to a herringbone pattern is super time consuming! No problem if you get a fixed price upfront or are doing it yourself but having just had our new walk in shower tiled (2m x 1m) in a herringbone pattern I was astounded by how long it took and the complexity of all the 45 degree cuts! It looks stunning but I selected the tiles and pattern with aesthetics in mind and definitely with no comprehension of the cost implications :) Best wishes, Claire

Hi, we found same parquet in our 50’s house- sanded it back and went to a nice oak colour, refinished originally with a dead flat varnish but over last 5 years went a bit yellow- recently resanded and finished with osmo white wax oil finish. We had some gaps that we filled with osmo floor gap filler. There were some loose ones that we stuck back down to the bitumen with no more nails which I’m sure is a no no but it worked. We borrowed a band sander so was cheap to do, but in hindsight you could hire a rotary sander for a day which wouldn’t be too expensive and much quicker. We love it- def worth keeping. The first pic with half and half shows the previous yellow varnish and the others are the raw wood/finished with white oil wax.