How to care for hardwood floors: top 10 maintenance tips

Apart from looking just astonishing, hardwood floors provide a warm homely feel to your house, giving it its special character and the beauty of natural materials.

Their elegance, durability, versatility, incredibly wide choice of the grain and the finish, numerous designing opportunities, the richness of the color and the value they add to the house make every homeowner fall in love with hardwood floors and think about including their installation into the upcoming house remodel.

The only drawback that throws many people off the idea to upgrade their homes and hire flooring contractors to install hardwood floors is their high price and even higher maintenance.

However, the beauty and the exceptional quality of hardwood floors are definitely worth spending money and maintenance effort on.

At the same time, as this flooring gets particularly affected by the environment it’s installed in, as well as the way it is exploited and cared for, the owners of hardwood floors have to pay special attention to the floor cleaning and maintenance routine, as well as learn all the dos and don’ts, which might influence the condition of their hardwood flooring and its lifespan.

Hardwood floor maintenance tips

1. Don’t use anything other than hardwood floor targeted cleaning products on your wooden floors. Those might include commercial cleaners, as well as DIY solutions suitable for hardwood flooring and the type of finish it was coated with.
2. Make sure to ask the flooring contractor, who installed your floors, what the most appropriate cleaning products and tools for your kind of flooring are.
3. No water allowed! If you spill some – wipe up as soon as you can. If you decide to wash your hardwood floors with it, think about how expensive it will be to get them reinstalled and change your mind.
4. Don’t use steam cleaners to deep clean hardwood floors, as they will deteriorate the protective finish they’re coated with, as well as cause water damage to the actual wood. The potential risks of applying steam cleaning techniques to maintain hardwood floors are related to the general rule, which prohibits the use of water on this type of flooring or at least encourages minimizing its use as much as possible. The moisture used during the steam cleaning is absorbed by the wood, which will make the boards of both engineered and solid hardwood floors to swell and their edges – to lift up over time. That damage is practically impossible to repair. And, we’re not even talking about the water’s and steam’s impact on the floor’s finish.
5. Don’t apply cleaning products directly onto the hardwood floors due to the same reason.
6. Eliminate unfortunate scratches and scuffs caused by moving chairs, tables and other furnishing pieces by covering their legs with protective felt pads. Don’t forget to replace them once they wear out.
7. If you have a dog or even a cat, make sure to make regular trips to the vet’s office to get your pet’s nails trimmed or learn how to do that at home. Untrimmed nails not only sound extremely annoying on hardwood floors, but also leave horrible scratches on their protective coat.
8. Tackle potty accidents and pet stains right away. The longer you let the urine sit on your hardwood floors, the harder it will be to get rid of the stain and the more moisture damage will be caused.
9. Don’t wear heels around the house and use doormats to prevent the outside dirt and debris from penetrating to your house and leaving micro scratches on your floors while walking.
10. Be mindful of the fact that wooden floors require maintenance recoating every 3-5 years, especially in the high-traffic areas. And, they have to be sanded down to the bare wood and refinished every 10 to 15 years. Don’t put away these maintenance measures for too long and go to HireRush.com to schedule a refinishing appointment with local hardwood flooring contractors once you notice that your floors call for the new finish application.