Wood Flooring

Nothing can quite compete with the understated elegance and beauty of traditional wood flooring. Decades ago, wood was the poplar choice fro residential flooring treatments, but recently the demand for real wood have decline considerably with the emergence of laminates and other inexpensive flooring material options. However, if you can boast of having real wood flooring in your home, you’re lucky enough to be a proud owner of one of the highly priced flooring product one can ever afford. So you need to focus on preserving its natural luster to ensure you can look forward to an increased resale value in the future.

With proper regular maintenance, your wood flooring actually develops a wonderful rich patina as it ages, unlike other flooring materials and treatments that actually depreciate after years of use. Dirt, grits and sand are among the notorious enemies of wood flooring, as these are the culprits for the fine scratches on your floor’s finish. Dirt can also easily imbed and accumulated in the tiny cracks and crevices found it between the slats of the floorboards. However, as in any other maintenance approaches, preventive care is still the most viable way to preserve and protect the surface of your wood. This calls for regular vacuuming using a non-reciprocating brush since an upright vacuum can actually cause slight scratches on the surface. Once or twice in a month, treat you wood flooring to a slightly damp mop to effectively clean out the grime. For your hardwood floor protection, the use of doormats and small area rugs is an efficient way to capture dirt, especially in high foot traffic areas.

Most of the wood flooring today is treated with a high durability polyurethane finish that effectively makes it practically impervious to moisture, while older wood floors are usually treated with waxes or varnish. However, no matter what type of finish you might have on your floor, the same rule still apply: accidental spills should be wiped right away with a damp cloth then a dry towel to make sure that you will be able to prevent the water from seeping through the slats what can cause warping. In the case that the spills left water stains, use a wood floor cleaner to easily remove the stain. Never use liquid soap. You can also use a mild solution of water and vinegar with a paper towel that is also known to work as effectively as well.

Before you apply anything on your floor, make sure that it doesn’t contain ammonium or any strong detergent since these ingredients are too abrasive for your wood. When shopping for a floor cleaner, choose a product that features neutral pH to make sure you are not causing undue harm to your wood finish.

Refinishing your hardwood would protect the natural luster of your floor. While some people have taken to using regular floor polish and other popular household products, none of these can actually designed for wood flooring use. More often than not, using such products leaves off cloudy and white streak marks that can pose a bigger problem than the one you originally started with. A solvent-based liquid wax is known to be the best wood floor polish to apply manually on the floor. While this might be a rather difficult and outdated way of polishing your floor, once you start buffing you will easily discover that all the hard work is well worth the effort. If you are covering a rather large area, consider renting an electric floor polish than can easily cut the buffing time in a mere fraction.

Unarguably, wood flooring takes a little more time to maintain than other floor treatments such as wood laminates. However, the synthetic counterparts can quite rival the quite beauty and elegance that you can only expect from real wood floorings.