How to Keep Your Hardwood Floors In Great Condition
Here's how you can keep your hardwood floors looking good at all times - without huge investments every season.
20/07/2020
Hardwood floors are a point of pride for a lot of homeowners. When looking to buy, a home with hardwood flooring will always fetch a higher price, because there’s a definite sense of luxury with the way it both feels and looks. However, hardwood floors - like many luxurious things - aren’t all that easy to maintain. They get damaged over time, and if you don’t know how to properly take care of them, your home will start to look more like a haunted house than a million-dollar mansion. So how can you keep your hardwood floors looking good at all times and without huge investments every season?
Set Some Ground Rules
The most important thing about having nice hardwood floors is preserving them. The best way to do this is to set some rules with everyone living in the house to make sure you give your floors the best possible chance. If it’s a private household, a very good rule to have is a no-shoe rule. When you enter the house, you take your shoes off and put on some soft-bottomed slippers. This way you’re preventing several things: dirt and grime from the streets won’t be spread across the house, which will keep your home overall cleaner.
In addition to that, the hard soles of your shoes won’t be marking and scuffing the surface of your floors. Especially if there are people wearing spiked heels that can scratch the surface of the floor.
Keep it Clean
Even if you don’t allow any shoes in the house, the floors will still get dirty. You will have to take measures to keep them tidy and clean because accumulated dirt will damage the floors over time. Depending on your style, the size of your home, and how much noise you can tolerate, you can either sweep or vacuum the floors. Sweeping will take you just a couple of minutes, but you might miss a few spots, and it won’t be as thorough as vacuuming. However, some vacuums might damage your floors if the heads aren’t lined with something soft and if their wheels aren’t the right material, so make sure you research what’s the best vacuum for hardwood floors, so you give them the best chance. If it’s too much of a hassle to take out the vacuum on the daily, you can combine the two techniques, sweeping daily and doing a thorough clean once or twice weekly.
Be Careful of Spills
The biggest enemy of hardwood floors is moisture. Wood is a natural material, and it reacts the same way wood would react in nature - if it gets wet, it swells up and potentially cracks. This is why you need to be vigorous with spills of any kind. As soon as it hits the floor, mop it up or just use a paper towel to soak up the liquid. Additionally, you want to prevent any moisture from getting to the floor entirely, so if you have hardwood floors in your entryway, where people would come in from the rain, the good idea is to place some sort of waterproof mat where people would dry off without spreading the rain all over the floors.
Keep the Renovations to a Minimum
Here’s the thing - everyone likes changing things up. Shifting around furniture is the easiest way to freshen up space and give it a new look. Painting the walls is the next easiest thing, but here’s where the problem lies: Firstly, hardwood floors stylistically go with big pieces of heavy furniture - often something mid century-modern. But moving this big, heavy furniture can leave marks and scuffs on the floor, so make sure you put on furniture pads, especially on items that are moved often, like chairs, and if you are moving bigger pieces - lift and carry. For all other renovations, make sure you cover all the floors in plastic protection, because paint spills, as well as microparticles of dust that will fall on the floor can cause scuffing and damage.
Which Cleaner to Use?
We already said that moisture is the enemy of hardwood floors, but you can’t just vacuum and call it a day all the time, because that just isn’t sufficiently clean. But dumping a rag into the water and wiping it all over the floors is not the answer. That is why there are specialty wood floor cleaners that will clean and protect the floors without saturating them with water and damaging them. Even with these cleaners, you don’t want to overdo it, so reserve the wet cleaning for once per month, and just spot-clean in between if you see the need.
Pets and Hardwood Floors
If you have some furry friends, your floors definitely won’t like them. If there’s a way to isolate them from the rooms with hardwood floors, do that, but otherwise, do your best to counter the damage they might be doing. Sweep and vacuum as often as possible to minimize the amount of hair, sand, and dirt on the floors. You might also want to think about investing in some socks for your four-legged friends, especially if they have claws that might scratch on the floor. If you don’t have the time to sweep after them all the time, you can invest in a roomba that will follow them around and clean up after them.
Refinishing the Floors
Even with the best care, your floors will
wear off, and you will need to refinish them.
Depending on how good you take care of them,
you’ll need to do this every 3-5 years, and you
will want to bring in the pros to do it. When
you have an investment such as hardwood floors,
you really don’t want to botch the job by
DIY-ing it and getting it wrong.
Hardwood
floors might take some extra work and care to
stay in shape, but the look they give to home
really can’t be replaced by anything else. These
are things you need to keep in mind if you are
looking to get a home with hardwood floors - but
don’t let the extra work scare you away! It will
be well worth it when you put it all together
and see the shine they get when the sun pours in
during the golden hour.