Whether you’re moving into a new home with beautiful new hardwood flooring or preserving old classic hardwood floors, it’s essential to understand proper maintenance to keep them for their full intended lifecycle. Without taking the proper steps, homeowners will have to deal with damaged floors, mildew, mold, and unsightly coloring, cracks, holes, and more. Mitigate these risks with the following wood floor care tips.
Best Tips for Residential Wood
Maintenance Cleans Are Key
No matter what time of year it is, your wood flooring is at risk for damage. Winter brings in excessive moisture and salt, fall brings in leaves with acidic properties, spring brings in mud, and summer brings in dripping towels and sand from the beach or pool. All of these are hazards for hardwood flooring, but damage can be mitigated with weekly cleaning.
These steps are recommended weekly:
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Sweeping
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Vacuuming
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Mopping with lukewarm water
Clean Accidents Immediately
If you live in a home with pets and kids, you’re no stranger to spills. However, when you have hardwood floors, you need to be extra careful about accidents. Luckily, if you clean up spills on wood floors immediately after they happen, long-term damage can be avoided. By letting moisture settle into the wood grain, you run the risk of mold and mildew damage. Dog or kid accidents are acidic and can also weaken the protective properties against future foot traffic, spills, furniture, and more,
Add Padding or Rugs
To protect your beautiful residential wood flooring, adding rugs to heavily trafficked areas, is essential. They can also take the brunt of the elements tracked in by shoes. It’s often recommended to place rugs in hallways, kitchens, entryways, and living areas around furniture.
If you don’t want full rugs under furniture, it’s recommended to use padding under each couch, table, or chair leg so that there aren’t issues where these touch the floor. When you put a barrier between the furniture and flooring, there will be minor wear and tear and long-term damage to the flooring itself.
Regularly Refinish
Hardwood flooring must also be refinished every three to five years. Refinishing wood can be a DIY project, but it’s recommended to hire professionals. During a refinishing project, these are the steps taken to make your floors look like new again:
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Removing base molding to protect it.
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Repairing areas of inconsistency that squeak.
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Sand flooring.
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Sweep or vacuum.
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Remove dust.
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Stain and finish floors.
Contact Ozburn-Hessey Company
If you’re ready to take care of your wood floors, and you live in the Nashville, TN, area, contact Ozburn-Hessey Company today to get started on proper maintenance and care for your hardwood flooring.
