“The only true wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing“. – Socrates
Why would you want to ask for my advice?
(If you are in a rush or don’t enjoy reading please navigate to the ‘OPTIONS’ section)
OPTION 1 £100 for 1 hr telephone consultation
OPTION 2 £550 for 5hrs on site visit with tools, machinery, materials, demonstration, tuition, full survey, provision of method and specification of how best to proceed. Up to 250 miles round trip / 5 hrs travelling. Will travel all around the UK for agreed costs, please ask.
Before I start, apologies for any verbosity, but this is my style and these are my own, original words, I find AI bizzare, a lazier dumber version of Wikipedia, so all the mistakes, poor humour or downright boring bits are all mine. Just like my advice.
Experience means nothing without constant study and questioning one’s own thoughts, methods and established ‘facts’. It is very easy to do the wrong thing for decades (I could cite quite a few youtube accounts) so take the following (on it’s own) with a pinch of salt. Ideally you would like to receive advice from someone who is constantly striving to learn and improve rather than assume that they already know everything.
Having said that, I am a seventh generation finisher, third generation wood restorer, have studied materials engineering, have around 50k + hours expertise (c.35k hrs practical c. 15k hrs study) have been headhunted by Sherwin Williams (World No 1 coating manufacturer) to be the Southern UK technical advisor, my published articles have been viewed over 1M times, I am a top contributor to UK and International forums, most notably Periodproperty.co.uk and Reddit. The National Geographic channel once asked to do an episode on restoration with me. Bear in mind, both the Sherwin Williams and Nat Geo channel approaches could just of been from lazy researchers / consultants.
Being so far along the Dunning-Kruger curve I am fully aware of most of what I don’t know and am constantly diligent to be open to the things that I thought I knew, but actually didn’t. I won’t go full Rumsfeld but basically I have a good handle on my Known Unkowns, it’s just that some of my Known Knowns turn out out to actually be wrong, I think this is what sorts the men from the boys. They call this part of the graph the ‘plateau of sustainability’. I personally would liken it to a nightclub that is full and is operating a strictly one in, one out policy. I am constantly watching, reading, studying, experimenting and learning things all the time still but I feel my overall level of knowledge is not increasing. This is because I am also discovering things that I thought were true are actually incorrect and I have been wrong, sometimes for many decades. I would rather liken this to one’s knowledge becoming more refined, not necessarily increasing. It’s humbling, the older I get, to realise I am far less intelligent as I used to think I was, ironic and a little tragic, there is no shame, everyone’s brain works in different ways, one is not necessarily superior to the other, at least it has made me proud to have made so much of an effort. So, if you too don’t always feel like the brightest lightbulb in the shop know that you can achieve quite remarkable things by a bit of extra effort, thought and imagination.
Unlike some, especially online, being wrong doesn’t upset me, in fact quite the opposite as it gives me the opportunity to learn something new. I am so happy for this capacity as otherwise my natural arrogance would preclude me from advancing further, I see this a lot and I have been very guilty of this in the past. I am not an especially clever person, nor am I especially technically gifted, apart from a natural curiosity and a creative nature I have only achieved my level of expertise through patience, hard work, practice and hopefully by learning from my mistakes. A large part of my learning has been from copying others more skilled than myself. I often have to do a whole lot more thinking and apply a whole lot more effort than other more naturally clever and skilled people, this is quite frustrating but if you like the results that you see on this website know that statistically around 50% of you will be able to do what I do and better and most of you will be able to achieve impressive results with a little practice, imagination and confidence.
It may sound trite, but I honestly believe almost anyone can do almost anything if they make enough effort, unfortunately there is one thing you will have to apply and that is effort and time, only then will your confidence grow, there really is no shortcut. I hope it is reassuring to know that with expert advice, like that that I offer, you can cut down a few thousand hours of study and practice by trying out the techniques, tools and materials that I suggest which will offer the quickest path to success, or, a much higher jumping off point for you to start from. You will still need to experiment and practice, but your results will start from a much higher level. A lot of my knowledge has been won by learning from mistakes over many decades which have been expensive both in time and money. I like analogies as I am a very visual learner, so think of my advice as a very large ladder in the board game of snakes and ladders (younger folk, look it up)
Remember. There is often more than one way to do a thing, you may think of a way that is better or more effective than mine.
I have spent thousands of hours giving free help and advice to thousands of people over the last 20 years including architects and project managers for Grade I landmark buildings including the Honourable Artillery Company and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
I am known by and in some cases in regular contact with the owners or technical managers of several of UK / Europe’s top wood finishing companies / equipment suppliers. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of tools, machines, abrasives, materials, stripping, sanding, staining, colour matching and finishing techniques. For example, I worked for three years at The Palace of Westminster, amounting to an entire man years worth of work, so that is an entire man year, stripping, staining and finishing 1841 linenfold carved English oak (and a little mahogany)
Also, I am not claiming to be a good person, only that I try my best, despite my faults and am very honest. I aim to offer accurate, transparent advice and will heavily qualify everything I am not 99.99% sure on.
Now it has become somewhat trendy to have some sort of neurodivergence I can admit that it is quite possible I have some form of weird hyperfocus ADHD. I have never been diagnosed but I think anyone who constantly studies and consistently works to a very particular standard must have something like this as it is quite rare and often doesn’t make much sense, at least from a business point of view. I guess many of our negative character traits also have a positive side and vice versa.
Why are you asking me for money for this pleasure?
Well. Because sadly you obviously haven’t invented a time machine. Yet. Because for the last 20 years I have given up thousands of hours of my free time to give free help and advice, sometimes for several hours over the phone or via email or on forums every week and sometimes every day, all, for free, much to the dismay of my family, friends and colleagues, who quite rightly think I’m a bit nuts. Recently I got a number of aggressive enquirers asking me to call them, at my expense, to give them free advice and even I turned to admonish myself. I get emails, DM’s on forums and telephone calls, very often from all over the UK and sometimes overseas. I really am happy to help it’s just that I like giving really detailed and accurate advice and this takes a lot of my free time and even can impinge on my work day.
Enough is finally enough. A number of my clients are now employing ‘heritage consultants’ who often really don’t have a clue, as do half of the surveyors they employ. I appear to have one of the most detailed repositories of niche information of my craft in my noggin I thought it might be fruitful to let it out and actually get paid for the thousands of hours of study and practice I have done. I’m not a brain surgeon or trauma nurse, or aid worker, I do little to benefit society but people seem genuinely pleased for any honest and accurate help they can get these days, especially as the internet is broken (see below)
The only thing that has changed is that after gifting many hundreds of hours of free help and advice I am now asking for modest remuneration for my time and effort, I think this is fair and reasonable.
You can, of course, still peruse my many thousands of archived comments on online forums and the dozens of free pages of expert articles on this website, at no cost, (many of my competitors have stolen content from my websites and charge for it via e-books) but if you would like a bespoke survey or consultation with accurate advice for your particular project, then read on
So. What are the OPTIONS?
Well. Option Zero would be to spend a few weeks hunting down and reading the thousands of forum posts and comments I have made on Periodproperty.co.uk or Reddit and read my three articles here on this website, all for free. Or.
OPTION ONE
£100 one hour telephone consultation. Includes follow up email summary + helpful links etc.
Contact me via email, telephone, whatsapp, carrier pigeon, arrange a mutually convenient time for a call, preferably in the evening or weekend, I will send you payment details, after I receive the money we will book in the call. Hopefully the call goes well and you save multiples of the money spent avoiding costly mistakes and a lot of unnecessary stress. I know some middle class types do a lot of their best work on Zoom but there really is no need for video calling, besides, my overpowering beauty may distract you. If you need to see stuff then maybe you should consider option two…
OPTION TWO
£550 full day, 5 hr personal site visit, survey and / or demonstration.
Includes up to 250 mile round trip / c 5hrs travel time, I regularly travel and work all over the UK, I am happy to visit in Scotland or Devon but would likely be an 18 hour day for me so prices will be higher to reflect that. Price includes a full survey and / or work quotation / estimate that can include lifting boards to assess sub floor / joists and estimate if necessary. Visit can include practical demonstration of techniques, eg, sanding, filling, coating, staining, colour matching, repairs. You can also get to try out thousands of pounds worth of professional tools and machinery.
Follow up email can provide survey summary, specifications and methods for undertaking works yourselves or for appointing your own contractors, much like an architects proposal, but much more accurate and detailed, as most architects have very low knowledge of the techniques I offer on older properties.
Contact me as above with as much information as possible, photographs etc and what techniques you would like me to demonstrate / teach and / or what machines / tools you would like to try out and get schooled in. I carry a first aid kit and full load of professional PPE by 3M, Bollé, Englebert Strauss etc. that you can borrow including ear defenders, dust masks, knee protection, eye protection. If you require a fume respirator then there will be an additional charge to cover this as these are bought new for you to keep. All sanders are connected to automatic industrial dust extraction equipment.
*If proposed works proceed then any fee will for the day will be refunded by deduction off the final payment at the end of the job.
My first websites, Floorsanding-UK.com and NewellPolishers.com were ranked number 1 in the English speaking world for ‘floor (space) sanding’ and floor (space) sanding (space) London from 2006. On Google, Yahoo and Alta Vista. In fact I held spots rank 1 and 2 on Google which was just taking over from Yahoo as the main search engine. How times have changed. Back then Google really cared about content and you got a serious bump when you got accepted into the Open Source Project database.
Even a total noob like me could simply read a copy of HTML for dummies, SEO for dummies and spend a few thousand hours playing around with cracked versions of Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver, copy and augment a few meta tags, add some novel and interesting comment and hey presto, rank number 1. I guess that would cost you around £50k pa now, so it was good whilst it lasted.
This does mean that every man and his dog in the country copied my website style and some of my prose, ho hum. As I write in 2025 Google search is corrupted and totally broken. The rank 1 floor sanding website now belongs to a Bulgarian Mafioso type criminal who at the last count had 22 websites, does terrible work, publishes fake reviews and threatens customers who don’t pay, whilst I am on page 13 or something. Unfortunate. Still, can’t complain, a better business person would of likely monetized the £1 to £1.5M worth of leads I received every year in 2006. But I digress.
I have tried my best to write, create and publish the best, most informative websites with the best, most accurate and honest information and the most high quality, high resolution photographs in my field. The most prominent ‘gentleman’ on youtube in the UK on how to sand floors? Well, when I was updating my free to read ‘how to’ articles I bought his paid for ebook. Interesting. As an example photo of how your period floors should look like after expert restoration he showed a lovely photo of almost inch thick yellow pine reclaimed from a Victorian Lancastrian wool mill, fitted and finished in Pepy’s Road, New Cross. There was no caption and I don’t have crystal balls, rather it’s because I was the person who bought, fitted and finished the floor and he had stolen my photo from my website, then charged people to look at it as an example of good work. That happened a lot.
Anyway. Half out of the need to create good quality and a good volume of unique, searcheable organic content (I never have and never will pay for payperclick or any advertising) I decided to publish my now quite infamous articles on floor sanding wood stripping and wood finishing which have been viewed over 1M times as of 2025. The other half, of course was to genuinely provide a free, informative and accurate (as to my current knowledge and ability) resource to help people. My first iterations were published in March 2006, coincidentally Periodproperty.co.uk started in May 2006, I immediately joined, helped promote it with website links on my top ranked website and was one of the three top professionals who wrote articles for the ‘Finding Out’ section. The lovely Rob Tavendale who founded the website never let me pay for advertising in the ‘seeking help’ section and I even got to visit him in his lovely thatched Cambridgeshire cottage and polish his hearth beam, taking care to sand around the warding marks. And thus over 19 years I have spent hundreds of hours offering free help and advice to thousands of people, many of whom contact me via phone or email as well as directly on the site. Sadly the gentleman who took over the forum when Rob stepped away is not mature enough to converse with people who disagree with him and thus I am barred, despite having the second highest reaction score on the site, helping to promote it and being instrumental in it’s growth (and being a member for 7 years longer and providing the most expert help and guidance) Ho hum. Each to his own. I guess the glass half full analysis would be he has taken over the self funding and day to day management of the site, now reduced to a singular forum, and that is to be commended. Especially the repository of information contained in the archive of all the posts going back to 2006, it is a fantastic resource still.
I now annoy people on Reddit with my pesky ‘knowledge’ and 50,000 hours of practice and study. I have no idea why people get so upset when someone quotes facts, learnt through study and practical experience, I personally relish it when I am found to be wrong, because it means I have the opportunity to learn something new, or delete something in my brain I previously thought was true. For a lot of people, especially on the internet, they cannot seem to break out of their cognitive dissonance.
And here we have the problem. The internet. It’s broken. Yes, thank you Google for your massive loss leader and personally providing me with tens of thousands of pounds of effectively free advertising in the early years and thank you for adhering to your original lofty ideals of ‘don’t be evil’ at least for a while, but, as a multi thousand hour, multi decade surfer I can tell all you young folks, its dead.
This is incredibly sad. It’s pay to play and with AI it’s regurgitate incorrect information, same with Wikipedia, Wikipedia is a fantastic resource and I feel guilty every time I refuse to make a voluntary payment, but the fact is half the information is wrong, half the stuff on youtube is wrong. I could take down the top woodworking youtuber in the USA with 5M subscribers for doing something monumentally stupid to his pieces, but, meh. What do I know? Apart from facts?
I grew up in Hornsey and was a regular visitor to Haringey Library which was 10 minutes up the road, I still remember loading the microfiche in the reference library, back then you really had to work for your knowledge. There was a period from the early 2000’s until around 2010 when the internet was a wonderful resource of easy to find well researched information, Google policed bad actors and promoted original, organic content. No more. I feel bad for everyone, we have this potentially amazing resource but currently it is broken and corrupted, gamified and dumbed down. Fake reviews, incorrect information repeated and amplified via Wikipedia or AI bots, it’s a literal minefield out there. I think it’s incredibly important that the national curriculum actually mandates an entire new subject and examination on the grounds of ‘information collation, dissemination and veracity analysis’. It’s literally an entire course in of itself.
For a detailed overview of how I work please see my Guide pages for extra help and advice.
