Preventive maintenance isn’t just a good idea, it’s the best way to care for your floor covering

Preventive maintenance isn’t just a good idea, it’s the best way to care for your floor covering.  The care of laminate, just like hardwood flooring, comes in three types: everyday cleaning, clean up of serious soiling, and the battle against mechanical damage.

Everyday care for hardwood flooring and laminate is simple: Use a vacuum cleaner.  It is also recommended to wipe the floor with a lightly dampened and wrung-out soft, natural rag.  If possible, it should also be wiped dry.

Beyond this point, the ways of care for hardwood floors and laminate begin to differ.

Serious spots and soiling on laminate are easy to remove using a solution of household soap or special chemical products for cleaning laminate (they do not contain alkali).  The use of abrasives and steel wool should be avoided – they remove the spot but cause mechanical damage.  It is best not to walk on laminate or hardwood flooring wearing shoes with sharp heels. Move furniture, even chairs, with great caution.  In caring for laminate, you should avoid the use of mastic, wax or silicone.  They do not penetrate into the laminate boards, but just leave behind an unsightly stain.  Small abrasions can be daubed over with a special paste of the appropriate color, but more serious damage can only be covered up.  Every couple of years it is recommended to remove the more worn-out laminate boards from the center of the room, for example, under couches or beds.  In front of a threshold, it is generally best to put down a mat.

The care of hardwood flooring is more complicated.  Classic hardwood flooring is covered with several coats of varnish.  Naturally it deteriorates over time and needs to be repaired.  Care of the hardwood flooring’s varnish should be done using chemically neutral substances.  It is even possible to spray on a substance which, in composition is close to varnish heavily diluted with water.  A substance like this has no odor.  Every couple of years it is necessary to refurbish the varnished surface.  It is either sanded off and a new layer applied, or (in very rare cases) the hardwood pieces are completely taken up, re-saturated, and renewed with several layers of varnish.

These days, hardwood floors that have an oil finish instead of varnish are becoming more and more popular.   It does not form a film, but penetrates into the upper layer of the wood, bringing out its pattern and improving resistance to mechanical wear and tear.  The care of a hardwood floor with oil-based products means that year after year it becomes ever more beautiful, with a deep and mellow tone, and even the life of such a hadrwood floor, instead of 10 to 15 years, could be twice as long.   Using these maintenance methods, it is necessary to regularly reveal the worn out “high traffic areas” in the room, and do it more often than sanding and refinishing with varnish.

They say that beauty requires sacrifice.  Beautiful hardwood and laminate flooring require certain measures to care for them, as well as time and simply gentle handling.