Hand-Scraped Wood Flooring – have you ever wondered if you loose wood texture when sanding hand-scraped flooring?

Yes, you would likely lose a good portion of the hand-scraped texture and character if you sand a hand-scraped wood floor.

Hand-scraped wood floors are intentionally distressed and textured during the manufacturing process. This is done by scraping or brushing the wood planks with a metal tool or wire brush to create dents, gouges, and an aged, rustic appearance.

When you sand a hand-scraped wooden floor, especially with coarse grit sandpaper, these hand-scraped details get sanded away and flattened out. The sanding process essentially removes the very texture and imperfections that give hand-scraped wooden floors their unique antique look.

Even if you only do a light screening with very fine grit paper, you will diminish and partially smooth out those intentional scrapes and marks in the wood grain.

To retain as much of the original hand-scraped character as possible, it’s best to avoid full sanding if you can. Options include:

Hand-scraped wood flooring Option 1:

Doing a chemical etching and recoating rather than sanding

Hand-scraped wood flooring Option 2:

Carefully hand scraping just the high spots and edges rather than full sanding

Hand-scraped wood flooring Option 3:

Accepting that some smoothing of texture is inevitable with any sanding

But in general, aggressive sanding will essentially erase and “refinish” away most of the factory hand-scrape detailing on the floor planks. So it’s wise to avoid sanding hand-scraped floors if preserving that specific texture is important.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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