i'm afraid the dust will not remain in place and will be collected by the varnish applicator and spoil the finish...i would carefully vacuum the floor and then varnish a small section to see if the holes become more obvious as the holes will fill with varnish and the thicker varnish over the holes may become darker and more obvious as the varnish ages but the traditional practice would be to putty the holes (although i quite like the "lived in" look of not trying to eliminate the earlier lives of the building and a good portion of the floor will be hidden by furniture and/or rugs) but, as usual, you'll have to live with the decision and it's much easier to choose the most effective procedure and only have to do it once

Agree. I always found the putty marks distracted from the beauty of the timber.

Glad to hear you are pleased with the results! Best wishes.

Kerri, you don't mix the meth spirits with water. The very few times I've used it I've worn a rubber glove, then carefully dampened a clean and lint-free cloth and wiped over the area. I always go with the grain, but don't think it matters in this case. You will have to do this several times depending upon the size of the area.

i don't know about the scratches, other than they usually fill in if you are using a stain. Are you staining the bare timber or leaving it natural?

Is the Intergrain Ultrafloor a stain finish?

I just looked it up & see it's a clear finish. I think you may still be able to see scratches but maybe not so much as pre-finish. Maybe others will know for certain.

Good to know. So glad your experimentation with maple stain worked out well for you! :)

Sorry a bit late to help out with this, but yes we also had masonite stapled on our boards (under lino) and the flooring guys did putty them (looking at them now they were quite large, I think they would've had to). Whilst the boards have lots of 'character', it was virtually impossible to get the putty to match the variations in the Tasmanian Oak boards, so the dots stuck out a lot. I asked them to come back and they dabbed a subtle stain over them which actually helped blend the colour a lot more. Also glad we used a satin finish as gloss would have highlighted the imperfect surface too much.

Way late to the party here, but another reason NOT fill dents/holes/gouges in your floorboads with putty, is to avoid my current nightmare. My 100+ year old baltic pine floorboards badly need re-sanding as there are lots of large grey patches where the finish has worn completely away which looks terrible and it‘s really hard to keep even half clean. Being a tad short of cash atm Im looking at doing it myself, so the other day I got down on my hands and knees and had a really good look at the patches that were worn, and it turns out that underneath 90% of them isn’t wood at all - its $#*&ing putty, and theres so much of it, in high traffic areas some boards are almost more putty than wood! its basically dirt magnet that’s really ugly yet really hard to remove, making the job of refinishing sooo much harder than it needs to be. If you plan on staying in your home for a while, chances are one day you’ll need to redo the floors, so to the question of putty? Just say no!