The Speedy Way to Clean and Maintain Your Hardwood Floors

Cleaning and Maintaining Your Hardwood Floors: Part 2

As we learned in Part 1 of this blog series, understanding the specifics of cleaning and maintaining solid hardwood is critical for homeowners with any amount of this hardwood flooring in their home. Hardwood flooring is an excellent and enduring addition to your house, but in order to preserve its pristine condition, homeowners must take particular maintenance measures that cater to hardwood directly. Therefore, in this second installation of The Speedy Way to Clean and Maintain Your Hardwood Floors, Speedy Floor Removal will reveal how to maintain hardwood floors by sharing the three most important maintenance rules to follow, as well as the top nine most essential hardwood flooring maintenance tips.

Maintaining Your Hardwood Floors

Maintenance Rules

In order to learn how to maintain hardwood floors, the three most important maintenance rules to follow are:

1. Wipe up spills immediately. Do not allow water to stand on the wood for any length of time.
2. Sweep or vacuum often. Ground-in dirt can destroy wood floors. Vacuum, sweep, or dust mop hardwood floors at least once a week. If using a vacuum, make sure that the vacuum head has a brush or felt on it, or use the wand attachment; do not use a vacuum with beater bars or hard heads. To dust mop hardwood floors, use a damp, flat mop with a microfiber head that will effectively collect dust and hair.
3. Choose the right rug. Some carpeting or rugs can stain the wood or affect the finish.

Adhering to these rules should enable you to keep your hardwood floor in exceptional shape for years. However, these other simple maintenance suggestions are also well worth your time and energy if you are really hoping to guard your investment in your wood floors. Some will mean simple additions to your home, like area rugs and entrance mats. Others can quickly become an effortless habit, such as taking your shoes off before you walk on your wood. And several of these tips need only be done on random, more rare occasions, such as when you are moving furniture.

Maintenance Tips

1. To help keep your wood from warping, maintain a relative humidity between 35% and 55% in your home.
2. To preserve the natural color and brilliance of your wood floors, protect them from direct sunlight with curtains, blinds, and rugs.
3. To keep your wood floors cleaner with less work, place interior and exterior doormats on both sides of entrances. These should prevent a good amount of dirt and moisture from being tracked onto the floors.
4. Place rugs made of breathable material near sources of moisture, such as kitchen sinks, in order to prevent moisture entrapment. Do not use mats with rubber, foam, or plastic backs, as these may capture moisture and consequently discolor the wood.
5. Place runners and area rugs with slip-resistant backings in heavily trafficked areas and at all pivot points in order to protect parts of the wood flooring that would suffer wear and tear more quickly. To make sure that the wood under these rugs continue to match the surrounding sections, move the rugs around occasionally.
6. If you have pets, keep their nails trimmed in order to stop their footsteps from scratching the wood.
7. Eliminate dents and dings in your floors by leaving shoes at the door and not walking on the wood with high heels, heeltaps, or sharp objects protruding from shoes.
8. In rainy weather, be sure to remove wet shoes and dripping coats somewhere other than on the wood floors if possible. Otherwise, remove wet items on a mat or towel and do not let them sit on the wood floors when wet.
9. Avoid rolling, dragging, or pushing heavy furniture and appliances across your wood floor so as to stop any unnecessary abuse. Use appliance lifts or plywood hardboard if necessary to move large objects, and position furniture leg protector pads under all furniture legs. Replace any hard, narrow rollers on your furniture with wide rubber ones.

Speedy Help For Hardwood Floors

Combining these important maintenance tips with our practical cleaning tips will effectively empower homeowners with hardwood floors to protect the ageless, attractive, and advantageous qualities of their floors for years to come. To revisit those cleaning tips for hardwood floors, visit last month’s blog, and to learn about how Speedy Floor Removal can help prepare your home for fantastic hardwood floors, contact us today!