Let's admit it. Installing hardwood flooring is quite a task and not many do it yourselfers succeed perfectly during their first try. True, installing hardwood flooring is a skill, but it can be less of a chore and a headache if you go with prefinished hardwood flooring in the first place. Prefinished means it has already been coated and sealed with translucent film which serves as its protection from daily wear. What finishings can do is shield your hardwood floor from spills and scratches, and make it easier for you to wipe or mop clean. If you're thinking of installing hardwood flooring yourself, you can enjoy the greatest ease and convenience with prefinished planks. With prefinished hardwood floors, the task of nailing the flooring to your subfloor ends after the drilling is done.
If you purchased pure hardwood oak or maple (or whatever is available), you will have to apply finishings, sand it down and put on wax and polishers after. The amount of time to perform the task of installing a hardwood floor is halved if prefinished wood is used. Prefinished floors also have a better finish than most independently finished floors. Because the application is uniform and the volumes of coating controlled and predetermined, you are sure that every prefinished hardwood floor plank is of the best quality. Normally, prefinished floors are thrice sanded and coated with aluminum oxide finish eight times. They are also likely to have been tested for various normal wear situations and made more resilient.
Prefinished flooring is a little more expensive than pure hardwood planks. However, when you do the math on everything that has to be done to make the basic form shine to your liking, you'll actually eventually spend a lot more with the latter, not to mention the heavy labor that you need to put into it. Sure, you can argue that you can always hire professionals to do the job for you, but if cost is an issue, then you’ll be thanking the high heavens that somebody had enough foresight to come up with prefinished hardwood flooring. Be a wise and practical consumer. Sanding and finishing entire floorings is a thing of the past. Now that prefinished floors are available, you should spare yourself from the hassle.
The author is a house painter who concentrates on landscape design, and you can refer to http://roofrepairs.co.nz/
30 Jan 2010
Tags: hardwood floor, hardwood floors
Posted in Wood Flooring | Comments Off
Learning about hardwood floor care is very important if you have hardwood floors in your home because of course you are going to want to make them last and keep them looking as best as you can for as long as possible. So in this case, there are a few tips for hardwood floor care in particular that you are going to want to learn and which are going to be helpful to you here.
Tips For Hardwood Floor Care
For hardwood floor care, one of the most important things to remember, which is not the case with say vinyl flooring, is that you are going to have to be very careful with what different products you are using on the floors. You are not going to want to be using products that contain a lot of chemicals, because these may end up wearing away the finish on the floor and leaving them in an unattractive state.
If you wish to be very careful with the products you ar plannng to purchase to use on your hardwood floors, read the label of ingredients before using it on your hardwood floors. If you find that there are any scuffs on the floor, you will usually be able to get rid of these with a fine steel wool, but again you have to be very careful and may just want to leave this up to the professionals to take care of if you are interested in hardwood floor care.
Another helpful hardwood floor care tip is to make sure that you always clean up spills and other messes right away when they happen, and never leave them to sit because they will soak into the wood and be much more difficult if not impossible to get out later on. You never want to let any spills or messes stay on your hardwood floors for longer than absolutely necessary.
A refinishing of your hardwood floors may also be a great idea, but this is not something that you are going to have to worry about if you are just installing new flooring. This is only something that may be done years and years after the floors have been installed, and which would basically just give them a refreshed, new look.
Also there many other great tips as well which you can keep in mind if you want to take proper care of your hardwood floors and make sure that they are going to last.
22 Jan 2010
Tags: hardwood floor care, hardwood floors, refinishing of your hardwood floors, vinyl flooring
Posted in Wood Flooring | Comments Off
