Floor sanding, tricky black stuff on old wood

punkgirlyuk

I have a floor sander hired this weekend to do my living room. Anyway there is horrible black stuff on the outer edges of my room. When sanding this it just coats the paper and is not coming up easily. The wood is possibly 1930's. Any advice to another solution to get this stuff from the wood?

safesound

I had the same thing on my stripped stairs, I ended up using a scourer and some floor cleaner in hot water. It was hard work but I mostly got it all up.

never_enough

I've come across this before when sanding floors. The easiest I found was to use a wallpaper scraper thing & get as much off as possible before using the coarsest sandpaper possible, working down to finer once it was off.
Good luck, it's a horrible job.

abwsco

We've had this in all the rooms we've sanded but one bedroom in particular was about 90% covered in it. We just had to use elbow grease and coarse sandpaper to get it off, first by machine, then by hand and then with the machine again.

Penelope_Penguin

We had similar on our Victorian floorboards. It tends to *blind* the papers, but perseverance, just using the machine, removed it all. They're now varnished and look beautiful!

Penny. x