Getting the most out of the floors in your home or business is vital. Flooring is something you want to be able to count on, and the process of tearing out the old floor and replacing it with something else can be costly and time-consuming. Luckily, there are actions you can take to extend the life of your floors.
How to Keep Your Floor Longer
Watch For Water and Moisture
The number one killer of flooring is water and moisture. The majority of problems you’ll deal with when it comes to flooring is water or moisture-related, so simply keeping an eye on the moisture levels in your home is going to do wonders for the long-term health of your flooring. A good rule of thumb is to keep the humidity levels in your home at around 50 to 60%, but be wary, since Nashville has a high humidity level. You’ll need to adjust it a bit depending on what your floors are made out of; hardwood flooring can handle a bit more humidity than something such as residential carpeting. Along similar lines of thinking, one of the single best things you can do for your floors is to clean up any spills as soon as possible. Letting standing water sit still is giving moisture the time it needs to seep into the lower levels of your flooring, which is where it can do the most damage.
Don’t be Afraid to Rearrange Your Life
One of the other main killers of flooring is basic wear and tear. You can minimize this by regularly moving the furniture in the room, so no one piece isn’t sitting in the same area for too long. This also creates new walkways so the same areas aren’t getting foot traffic all the time. Even something as simple as walking over the same stretch of commercial carpeting can have massive long-term consequences. It’s not limited to just the physical pressures either. If a patch of flooring is exposed to the sun for a long time, it will warp, especially vinyl flooring, or it will fade in the sunlight, like you often see in carpeting, and hardwood flooring.
Sand Away the Marks of Yesterday
This is something that really only applies to hardwood flooring, but you can actually sand away layers of the flooring and resurface it. It’s a very useful tool to extend the life of your flooring. First you sand down the surface, removing any blemishes, and then you seal the surface with a special resurfacing finish. Resurfacing hardwood floors is a great idea if you want to give the flooring a facelift, or a new color tone. Resurfacing your hardwood flooring is vital to get the kind of longevity most people expect from the material. This is a process you can repeat multiple times throughout the life of the floor; depending on the specific material. There are even some forms of engineered flooring that allow for resurfacing, although you can only do it one or two times at the max.
If you pay attention to the floors in your home or office, make sure to clean up spills as soon as possible, and be sure to keep an eye on the everyday wear and tear the flooring receives, and think about resurfacing the floors if possible. Doing this will help to extend the life of the floors in your home or office, and when it’s time to make a change, the professionals here at Ozburn-Hessey will be here to help with anything you need!
