For the Love of Wood

By Jo Phillips

How To Keep Your Wood Floors Looking Great

Each passing season, your hardwood flooring provides new challenges. Winter brings snow, ice, and salt, spring brings rain and dirt, summer brings chlorine and saltwater, and fall brings even more dirt and leaves. Despite the maintenance, wood floors are simply too beautiful to pass up. So, how should solid wood flooring be cared for?

unsplash.com/

Spills should be cleaned as soon as possible.

Avoid using wet or steam mops as they cause greater damage over time. Instead, use a dry or slightly damp towel to wipe up any spills right away. Because wood swells and shrinks in response to moisture, both on the surface and in the air, it is critical to maintain low humidity levels to avoid cupping, splitting, and gapping. The easiest method to avoid these problems is to wipe up spills right away, maintain your home’s humidity, and keep damp shoes out of the house.

Make use of furniture pads.

Scratches are among the most difficult problems to resolve with hardwood flooring. Although some marks are natural, others are completely avoidable. One of the best ways to manage them is to use furniture cushions on the legs of your chairs, couches, tables, and so on.

Sweep or dust once a day

This could appear overwhelming, but it is strong advice. Regardless if you have a no-shoes policy in your household, dust accumulates all over and creeps into the grain as well as between floor joists. Call it a sanitary hazard if you have animal companions around the house who just never stop shedding.

unsplash.com

Weekly Vacuuming

Weekly vacuuming, as terrible as it may sound, is essential not just for keeping your house clean, but also for ensuring that any bits of food and debris missed when sweeping does not harm your floors. 

Apply wood cleaners monthly

Use chemicals that clean as well as maintain the finish so it can withstand the stress your family can throw out. Determine the right floor cleaning solutions for hard, surface-finished, or polyurethane-treated floors. The chemicals in these cleansers remove dirt and grime without harming the coating or dulling the lustre.

Polish every when needed

When your wood floors get dull over time, you can rejuvenate them by recoating them. This entails putting a fresh layer of wood floor finish, as well as the frequency with which you’ll have to do this is determined on the person’s or family’s lifestyle.

Verified by MonsterInsights