Refinish Your Hardwood Floor

While having hardwood flooring is modern, chic and cozy, the shine of this type of flooring will not last forever. It will simply fade away with time and lose its luster. One way to enliven this type of floor is by waxing, but that is only a temporary solution. The best way to get back your original shine and sparkle is to refinish your hardwood floor.

Truth be told, it is not an easy feat to accomplish. Unless you really know what you’re doing and you’re kind of a DIY type of person, you’d better hire a professional to do the job. Especially if you have maple floors, as they are particularly tough to take care of.

First of all you need to decide if you indeed need to refinish your floor. Sometimes it is not necessary, even though at first it seems like it. When you only have some minor scratches on the surface or the luster has decreased in intensity, you could get away with adding a coat of finish. But you might have a floor that has really worn off and nothing short of refinishing will help. And there are also cases when even refinishing might not be enough, when you really have to replace the planks of wood on the floor. For example if the planks are already soft or sagged, if they seem spongy, you might have to replace them completely.

As refinishing is quite tough on the wood, you can’t do it often and sadly after a few times the process will no longer be useful for the wood. One way to check how much wood you still have is by checking the board edges.

So how do you refinish your hardwood floor?

First of all check for any gaps in the wood. If you notice them during winter, that’s OK, but during summer you need to fill in those gaps. Next you need to sand which means using tools such as drum sander, buffer, palm sander, floor edger, a vacuum cleaner, all tools that are quite noisy in nature. This is why wearing ear protection such as ear plugs is quite necessary. Also avoid leaving the sander in one place all the time as it tends to damage the wood.

Once the sanding process is done, next comes staining. First get the proper type and shade of stain and then apply it with the grain in five foot wide parts. To get your new floor ready you need to leave it for about a day to dry.

If you’ve done once floor refinishing you already know how difficult yet how rewarding this job is. There is nothing like looking at your new and fresh floor, knowing that it was all your doing.