News

Maintaining and refurbishing your hardwood floor

Hardwood floors are organic, nature’s gift that brings warmth and a resilient beauty into our homes; technology has expanded our choice of colour, texture and finish exponentially. However, hardwood floors have a life span that, like anything else, need care and attention to keep them looking beautiful and make them last longer.

How to keep your floors natural lustre?

Rule number one is to keep your floors swept so that dust, grime and grit do not get ground into the fibres of the wood. Such abrasion not only takes the shine off the finish but also breaks the tough surface barrier to the softer timber fibres below. Once this is broken, the and bare timber is exposed, it is open to absorbing spills and dirt.

To clean the hardwood floor, never, never, use lots of hot soapy water with a supermarket floor cleaning solution. On the internet, you will find wood protection products that clean and feed the wood to preserve it lovely qualities. We recommend OSMO or Bona which are deigned specifically to work with the sealants to help protect your floor. They are applied with a spray mop, so only a small amount is needed.

There are some areas of your floor that get more rough treatment than others: in doorways where footfall is heaviest, for example. Kitchen floors, too, get severely punished around the oven and hob areas where spillages of boiling water and hot fat or oils occur. To minimise the damage clean the spillage up at once. However, it is good to anticipate these problems with an extra layer of a maintenance lacquer or oil, these can be applied periodically.

Moving furniture about can scuff the floor horribly. It is best to fit felt pads under the legs. If you have a workstation at home, beware the casters on an office chair; the constant rolling back and forth can create deep furrows in the wood and quickly turn the area into a fibrous mess. The best way to avoid this is to lay a mat beneath the chair.

 

When is a floor past redemption?

HS Wood Flooring will not replace a floor just because it is scratched and dull. We will give it a close inspection and, very often, rescue it. You would be surprised how we can make an old floor look like new with obvious saving in costs. There are other benefits, too. By taking less than a millimetre off the surface with a near dust-free sander, most of the problems disappear and leave you with the original beauty of the timber you thought had gone forever.

But that’s just the start: we can colour it as you wish. We can make Oak look like Ebony, bleach it to white or colour it to virtually any colour you like. New technology also enables us to texture the wood: leave it so it’s absolute smooth or wire brush it to accentuate the grain.

And when that’s done we can finish it with a reactive stain that works with the tannins in the wood to colour it. Hard wax oils and lacquers can also be used to tint the wood. We can even lay out colour tests on your existing floor.

If there is a patch with little or no hope of repair, we will match the wood and replace the offending parts. To look at the finished product, you could never distinguish the old from the new.

 

We are London’s caring wood flooring experts

We are fully committed to saving the world’s precious forests. If we can, we will do our best to save a floor – and another tree from the forest.

Our team of craftsmen have immense experience of fitting floors and refurbishing them. We have fitted new floors on several of London’s major sports arenas: The Olympic Stadium, Wembley, Emirates, Wimbledon … Luxury hotels and famous restaurants … prestigious West End stores and showrooms … and a host of private houses both big and small in South West London. We work quickly and cleanly and to an agreed budget. So, it is no surprise that HS Wood Flooring are the preferred fitters for London’s premier hardwood floors suppliers.

Website: www.hswoodflooring.co.uk

Email: office@hswoodflooring.co.uk
www.hswoodflooring.co.uk • @hs_wood_flooring

Share: