Lift a tired carpet in a Victorian terrace and there is a good chance you will find pine or oak boards underneath: grey with dust, peppered with tack holes, and streaked with the remains of a varnish somebody applied in 1978. The instinct is to skip it and order something new. That is usually the wrong call. A floor that looks beyond saving on a Sunday afternoon can look remarkable by the end of the week, for a fraction of the cost of replacement and without the embodied carbon of new timber.









