Cleaning Parquet blocks is a dirty dirty diy job...

I managed to get a work bench from the recycling area for our apartments - lovely kind people keep on leaving great stuff there instead of sending it to landfill....I am totally in favour of this approach to life!

I set the workbench up in the lounge and set to work with scraping the dirt off the sides of each block. I left the dowels in either end and swivelled the blocks round scraping as I went. About every hour I had cleaned a couple of metres worth.  It is a long job so have some other form of entertainment going whilst you do this bit... I had a film on which is always a good thing! My blocks had bitumen on the bottom of them which you don't need to clean off. The blocks had been stacked up together and the bitumen often is also left in sticky clumps on the top as well. These clumps on top may as well be left on and in the process I discovered the best way to deal with this.

I layered my parquet in the lounge and bedrooms in a herringbone manner with a single lane border of blocks and in the hallway I layered the blocks in a brick wall style.