How To Make Your Home Look Elegant Again By Way Of Reconditioned Flooring

By Author: Jo Alelsto
Total Articles: 405
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More and more home and building owners are trying to keep up with the costly maintenance of residential and commercial establishments. With the cost of materials reaching the sky, it is as if re-designing or renovating homes and buildings nowadays are luxuries and no longer a necessity.

However, one way to maintain the elegance of a home or building is to sustain its magnificent look without the cost. One way is to enhance flooring. Nowadays, many home owners, developers, and building owners are putting hard wood and engineered wood floors in the buildings for one primary reason: people are attracted to nice-looking and well maintained wood floors.

Studies have shown that homes and buildings with wood floors encourage more traffic than those with carpet or tile. Wood, however, requires considerably more maintenance than carpet or tile, and occasionally restorative efforts are required to keep wood floors in premium condition. To answer questions that often arise regarding restorative efforts, a basic understanding of the nature of wood, such as hard wood and engineered, is necessary.

What are hard wood ...
... floors?

Hard wood is a actually a general term used to name a lumber or veneer produced from broad-leafed or deciduous trees in contrast to soft wood, which is produced from pine or coniferous trees.

Basically, trees with leaves give us hard wood, while trees with needles give us soft wood.

When used in enhancing homes or buildings, hard wood can be used as engineered wood. This pertains to an assembly made by bonding layers of veneer or lumber with an adhesive. Usually, it is a three layered structure namely the face, the core, and the back. The layers are locked together to improve dimensional stability by alternating the wood grain at each level.

At some point, wooden floors, even hard wood, need restoration. Clearly, damage to wood floors is normally caused by moisture. Floods, spills and incorrect maintenance can easily result in damage to your wood floors. Fixtures, dragged across floors by unknowing visitor or a child playing with his toys maybe, can cause numerous scratches and marks. Even the foot traffic itself will often damage a wood floor.

Indentation will occur from the heels of shoes, and even more so from protruding nail-heads. Clearly, there are times when restorative efforts are required.

Here's how:

1. Sanding

Sanding is the more aggressive and more expensive restorative service. Sanding a floor is a process of removing both the finish products and wood from the floor to remove minor abrasions. Most engineered floors can be sanded twice before replacement. A hard wood floor can be sanded repeatedly based on the thickness of the floorboards. After sanding, the floors will need to be re-stained in most cases and both sealed and top-coated with multiple layers of each product.

2. Screening

Screening is a restorative service that is less aggressive and less expensive than sanding. This type of service can equally bring new life to your wooden floor. Screens similar to those in residential windows are cut in rounds to fit a low speed buffing machine. The screen will remove the surface product on the floor without removing the wood itself.

Both engineered and hard wood floors can enhance and maintain the elegant look of your home or building. But keep in mind that they need maintenance as well. However, these things are not that costly since you always have alternatives to outlive the financial burden of maintaining a home or building. So, the next time you try to renovate your home or building, try to look on the materials that need restoration first to save on maintenance cost.
Jo is a writer for ‘EBL Group Limited' (http://www.eblgroup.co.uk), a family run, well-known and approved house insurance refurbishments contractor stationed in Runcorn Cheshire. If you need insurance building repairs as a result of flood, storm, fire malevolent or fortuitous damage or some other causes or if you have home and buildings improvement requirements then you should check out EBL Group.