Treat your floors with linseed soap - Guide

A wooden floor treated with linseed soap in a turn-of-the-century setting is both beautiful, typical of the period and environmentally friendly! We recommend that you use Selder Golvsåpa to treat your wooden floors because it is so easy to maintain. As the floor is first saturated with soap, it only needs to be mopped with cold water on the next cleaning occasion, the water will dissolve the soap in the floor and you therefore do not need another cleaning agent. Depending on how often you clean, one soap treatment is enough for about 50 scrubs before the treatment has to be repeated. This treatment is suitable for living rooms and bedrooms. In kitchens and hallways where the floor is exposed to more wear and tear we recommend a more hardwearing treatment.

Treat your wooden floor with soap - Step by step

1. To begin with, the floor should be dry, if it is damp with water there is no place for the soap to penetrate the wood.

2. Pour soap onto the floor, you can use a floor brush or a water scraper to spread the soap, this is done to saturate the floor with soap.

3. Move the soap around over the floor so that the wood can be saturated evenly.

4. When the floor can't take any more soap, it's time to remove the excess and then mop the floor with cold water. Don't wait too long to remove the soap, if it dries it will be sticky. We recommend that you let the soap work for approx. 30 min-1 h.

5. Then mop until the water runs clear, it may take 6-7 moppings.

This is how different types of wood react to floor soap as a treatment:

• Pine floors that are treated with linseed soap becomes grayer over time.
• Spruce floors becomes very bright with a white-ish tint.
• Oak, elm, ash containing tannic acid will react with the soap and darken but lighten after each mopping during the treatment.
• Teak (outdoors) turns gray from a soap treatment.