Restoring Hardwood Floors: An Overview

Do you have scratched, dingy, discolored, and damaged hardwood floors? Or perhaps your home came with carpets that are covering up beautiful hardwood underneath them. Did you know that restoring hardwood floors could be much easier than you thought? In this article, we'll give you an overview on how to restore a hardwood floor.

The first thing you'll need to do if you want to try restoring hardwood floors is to peel back your old carpet and the underlying pad. You will want to be attentive to what techniques the carpet-layer used to attach the carpet and pad. You may find staples, in which case, you will need to remove all of them. Or you may find some kind of glue.

If glue was used, you will need to identify the type of glue (bring a sample of the carpet to your local hardware store) and purchase a solvent which will melt the glue away. Even if you do find the correct solvent, there will be a lot of scraping to remove all the glue - finding some people to help you is a great idea.

Once the glue is removed, you can examine the floor to see if any parts of it are damaged or irreversibly stained. You can try sanding it down, or you may need to replace parts of it with new wood. If you replace with new wood, you will want to try to identify the type of wood used and how it was milled, as well as its grain, so that you can find an identical replacement.

You may also discover that the old nails that have been used on the floor have rusted. This is a more difficult problem for hardwood floor restoration, and you may have to call in an expert to take care of it. However, you could try a product designed to remove rust and see if that removes the rust stains sufficiently.

Restoring hardwood floors can be a major project, depending on the size of your floor and the condition of the wood underneath. However, you stand to reap great rewards by removing that old carpet to reveal the beautiful old wood floor that may have been original to your home. Original hardwood floors can greatly increase the value of your home.