Here are the questions asked by community members. Read on to see the answers provided by the ThriftyFun community.
I want to remove oil based paint from wood floors that it has been on for over 50 years. My father put white paint over many nails to keep them from popping up and then put a rug on the dark brown floor.
By Rae Ann Anderson from Templeton, CA
You must be careful to make sure there is no lead in the paint. You can buy a test kit. You can cause serious dammage to kids heath if they breathe the dust from lead paint as well as your own.
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How do you remove paint droppings on wood floors without ruining them?
Kerry from Michigan
I painted my bathroom and had paint drops all over my oak vanity. I had a bottle of rubbing alcohol sitting on the counter and tried it out of desperation. It got all the paint off and was extremely cheap and safe. (04/30/2008)
By sara
We recently bought a house that was built in 1882. I pulled the carpet up from one of the bed rooms, and to my dismay, there is old dried paint all over the beautiful wood. Where I tried to use warm water and a srubbing sponge, (as a friend suggested), The finish was also rubbed away. Is there any CHEAP way to fix this floor? Any ideas would be very helpful.
Rent a Electric Sander and sand the floors until even. Be careful not to go too deep or it will ruin the wood. You can stain the floors or just put a Poly type vanish on them. They will only have to be mopped or dusted, not waxed.
We have an 101 year old house and when we moved into it all the floors had been painted about 10 to 12 times. My husband rented a sander and sanded all of the upstairs floors. They were a lot of hard work, but ended up with beautiful floors. We are still working on removing all carpet and doing the downstairs next.
Good luck with your work. It never ends in an old house. (02/28/2006)
By Pat
If paint is truly plentiful, I think a whole-floor sanding is the only way to take care of it. (Go ahead and get a quote from a service or two over the phone if you don't want to do it yourself--it's surprisingly affordable.) If you just have a few isolated spots, you could spot sand them out (by hand) then use a stain to blend those spots in with the rest of the floor.
Or, you could do what I do if they're just little bothersome spots and splatters: apply Minwax GEL stain to the paint in a matching color and don't wipe it off--let it dry about 12-24 hours. It has a transparent quality and unlike regular stains, actually sticks to paint. I use it for touch up all the time around my old house where old paint has dripped on my craftsman-style wood trim. I even made the badly-painted risers on my front steps look like natural dark wood by painting the gel stain over the paint with a rough brush that mimicked wood grain to some degree. It really is different from paint! a (03/01/2006)
By alex rock
I discovered by desperation that non acitone nail polish remover and a small scrubber will get paint off a wood floor. I have a 4 year old that got into spray paint and sprayed his bedroom floor with it. This worked great at getting it off. (04/26/2008)
By amy
