Refinishing wood floors can greatly enhance the beauty of your home. By having your hardwood floors restored you avoid the problems that can be found with carpet and other flooring types. Cleaning is easier with hardwoods, usually just going over them with a damp mop will do, whereas with carpet you really need to hire a professional to have the job done. With tile flooring, you have to deal with keeping grout lines clean and hoping that your tile will not crack.
At Duke Construction one of the services that we provide is sanding, refinishing or repairing wood floors. You may have a bad section of hardwood flooring in a room, but that does’t mean you have to replace the entire floor. You just cut out the bad section and replace the wood in the stained or broken area. Here is what the process is like and what you can expect should you decide to have your hardwood floors refinished.
We always tell our customers before we get started that it is not a quick or one day process. And if you are doing the entire home it could take up to a week or more to get the job finished….and that’s only if you don’t run into problems. If dust or fumes cause you problems, then you may want to consider staying at a hotel for the week. The process, as you now know, is a dusty affair. Our team is always very careful to cover furniture and walls with plastic. But even with the coverage, there will still be dust – it is impossible to pick up all the dust. Once the job is done, we recommend that you go over everything with a vacuum and dust rag. Though the process is not as bad as sanding drywall, which also gets the fine particles everywhere, it is still a struggle to control the fine wood particles that will be floating in the air while sanding. Don’t let the problem with the wood dust discourage you, because the end product will be well worth it Just knowing that there will be a dust problem and being prepared for it helps. I have used just about every kind of sander there is and each has its special use. Sometime we can go over the floor lightly with a vibrating sander and put polyurethane on. Most of the time we have to come in with a drum sander which cuts the wood much faster. I often joke with customers saying, “Do you know why they call hard wood hardwood. Because it is hard!”I mean really hard. This is why it take so long to do the job – you have to go over and over the floor, slowly getting it to raw wood where you can then start the process of getting the bad spots sanded out. If you get in a hurry you will end up with a lot of gouge marks in the floor. You have to sand the floor down in the entire room one pass at a time with the sander. Once you have sanded down to the raw wood and smoothed out as many imperfections as you can, you can either put the polyurethane on or you can put in filler. Filler is mainly made up of the saw dust you retained as you sanded the floor and glue. Once you mix the two together, you take a rubber trowel and press it into every crack and hole in the floor.You can bypass this step, but if you do, you lose two important aspects. The first positive aspect of filler is that it fills all the cracks and seams, giving the floor a cool look. Second, if your floor squeaks a lot this can cut down on a lot of the squeaks as you walk over the floor. You then sand the floor through three different grits of sandpaper. Once you have a nice clean smooth floor, it’s time to either stain and then polyurethane, or, my favorite,just put the poly on and let the natural color of the wood come out. Beautiful! There are a wide range of stains you can put on the wood. You then apply two to three coats of poly and then let it dry for a day and now you have a totally new floor. If this sounds like something you would like to have done, just give us a call at 325-665-8025 or email us at steven@dukeconstructiontx.com.
