Floor Sanding in Swanley — Wood Floor Restoration & Fitting

Swanley sits just inside Kent, and its housing is more mixed than most of our area — a small older core, large post-war estates, and a lot of building from the 1990s onwards. That mix means we see more engineered flooring here than in the older London suburbs.

The floors we find in Swanley

The older part of Swanley has Victorian and Edwardian cottages with narrow pine boards. The post-war estates were built with softwood boards, and later phases with chipboard, which cannot be sanded at all. Newer developments almost always have engineered board, either floating on underlay or glued to a screed.

How do I know if I have real wood or chipboard?

Lift a corner of the carpet in a doorway. Real boards run in strips, usually 4 to 6 inches wide, with visible joints along their length and grain that continues across the board. Chipboard comes in large sheets, typically 600mm wide, with a speckled compressed surface and tongue-and-groove edges. Chipboard cannot be sanded or finished — if that is what you have, the options are a new floor over the top or replacing the deck. We will tell you which within a minute of looking.

What a job in Swanley usually involves

• Survey and moisture check. We measure board thickness and check whether the floor has been sanded before. On a board already sanded two or three times there may not be enough timber left, and we will say so.
• Repairs first. Loose, split or missing boards are fixed before any sanding. Sanding a loose board just produces a smooth loose board.
• Dust-free sanding. Coarse grit to remove the old finish and damage, then progressively finer grits until the surface is closed.
• Gap filling, if wanted. Resin and sanding dust for hairline gaps, timber slivers for wider ones. Post-war Swanley boards tend to be tight and even, so resin filling usually works well and looks invisible.
• Finish. Hardwax oil, lacquer or oil, two or three coats.

How long it takes and what it costs

A single room in Swanley is usually one to two days; a whole ground floor three to five. Guide rates are £25–£32 per m² for standard boards and £32–£42 per m² for parquet, with a £550 minimum project cost. We are not VAT registered, so there is nothing to add on top. Full detail on the prices page.

Get a price for your Swanley floor

Send a photo to info@epic-floors.com or call 07344 467352. We can usually tell from a picture whether a floor needs sanding, repair or replacing, and give you a ballpark before visiting. Open Monday to Saturday, 8am to 6pm.

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