Vitrificateur

We were not quite certain on how to approach the floor in the salon. It’s a hard wood parquet floor, and had become a bit battered looking over time. We had polished it a few times, and used a mechanical polisher to buff it, but it is quite time consuming and I never feel it looks as good as the amount of effort we put into getting it to that point. So we were thinking of using a hard-wax oil, a product we have used before on the floor in the attic area. It’s quite easy to apply, but does need to be reapplied every few years, especially where it gets a lot of wear and tear. We decided we would make a visit to Weldom (our local DIY store) to see what they had.

We thought we’d not waste time looking, but instead practice our french and ask the lady assistant if they had ‘hard wax oil’…they didn’t. However, the lady we spoke to was very helpful and patient. She proposed us two other products, an oil similar to what we had asked for, but not hard wax oil, or something completely new to us called ‘vitrificateur’.

We showed her some photos of the floor Brian had on his phone, and after a lot of reconfirming what we thought she had said, we decided the vitrificateur was the product for us.

It is a varnish like product, but is ceramic based, so is very hard wearing. Before we started on the whole floor we did a test on a small area of floor under where the radiators will be fixed. We wanted to be certain it would work. All went well.

We then worked out our plan of approach on the whole floor. First of all we needed to do a light sanding of the floor. We did this by hand using a 120 sandpaper.

Then we needed to clean down all the dust ready to coat it with the vitrificateur. The first coat needed three hours of drying time, whilst the second coat needs to be left for 24 hours.

It has been a really simple product to use, the application is very straight forward. Brian brushed it on around the edge of the room, and I used a roller to cover the bulk of the floor. The end result is way beyond what I’d hoped for, so glad we took the plunge to talk to the lady at Weldom, and trust in her knowledge of their products.