Wood Floor Repair - Why It Pays to Get the Professionals In
Beautiful solid wood flooring can look wonderful, creating a real sense of style and individuality and a modern, contemporary feel within any home. There are many different types of real wood flooring, each with a look that is entirely its own. Aged or distressed flooring, the distinctive lines of parquet flooring, there's engineered wood flooring and strip floors as well as mosaic panels and end grain wood block floors.
Aged & distressed flooring
Aged wood flooring or distressed flooring
presents a stylish, lived in look. It looks, for all the world, as if your
flooring has been laid for years and adds a certain authenticity to your home.
Aged and distressed flooring is also a very practical choice for both homes and
commercial properties because it keeps looking good for longer. The rugged,
worn, lived in appearance will not show the scratches and marks caused by
everyday usage. They are also a popular choice because they never require
sanding unlike other types of wood floors.
Parquet flooring
Parquet wooden floors are a very popular
choice and one of the reasons for this is that a parquet floor can be laid in
so many different ways, with so many different patterns. The patterns available
are Herringbone, Double Herringbone, Single Basket Weave, Treble Basket Weave
and Chevron. You can also opt for parquet panels, parquet borders, parquet
motifs and parquet floor medallions.
Engineered wood flooring
Engineered floors can be installed which
either floating on underlay, are secretly nailed to existing wood sub floors or
fully glued to the concrete or timber sub floor. Engineered floors are very
good if you need to reduce the noise level in a room and they work well with
under floor heating systems. Engineered wood floors are available in a wide
range of sizes from 14mm 3 strip floors to 20mm structural engineered wide
planks. Strip Floors
There is wide choice of solid tongue and
grooved strip flooring available which his available in European Oak, French
Oak, American Black Walnut, Wenge, Distressed Oak, Reclaimed Pine and Merbau.
Strip wood floors, like engineered wood flooring, can be secret nailed to
timber sub floors or glued to concrete sub floors but unlike engineered wood
floors, they are not recommended for use with under floor heating systems.
Strip floors are very easy to maintain and can be sanded many times to refresh
their look making them great value for money.
Mosaic Panels Mosaic Panels, also known as
finger parquet, is an old style of flooring used a lot in the 1960's and is
available in European Oak, Mahogany, Teak and Merbau. If fitting mosaic panels
to a wood or concrete base, an epoxy glue should be used but if the panels have
a felt backing then a spirit based adhesive should be used. End grain wood
block floors
End grain wood block flooring is available
in a number of wood species including European Larch, European Oak, European
Smoked Oak, Pine and Spruce. The wood is cut across the growth rings to produce
a very different look to that achieved using the more usual strip flooring. It
is extremely hard wearing and so is ideal for areas that experience a lot of
foot traffic.
Wood floor repairs
From time to time your wooden floor will
need repairing, either to remove scratches or stains or even to correct a floor
that was badly laid in the first place. Scratches can be sanded away using fine
to medium sand paper but it is recommended that any stained floorboards be
replaced because, depending how deeply the stain has entered the wood, you may
have to sand quite hard to get the stain out and this could mean that section
of flooring will not look the same as the rest.
If you are fortunate enough to inherit an
original wood floor or are looking to restore a floor you covered years ago
with carpet, you may need to carry out some repairs. This may involve replacing
sections of the old wood floor with new wood. Should you need to do this, it is
advisable to source wood that, as closely as possible, matches the original
wood, in colour and type.
Once the repairs have been carried out, the
floor should be machine sanded to a fine finish and any gaps filled. With this
done you can set about staining the floor to your chosen colour. Sometimes,
stains in your flooring will only become apparent after the floor is machine
sanded or even after applying the new chosen finish. If this happens, you may
choose to replace that section or leave it because it adds character to your
floor.
Original parquet floors were glued and
pinned using copper headed pins. Over the years, these eroded leaving staining
around each fixing. Unfortunately these stains cannot be removed, but it must
be said, they form part of the floors character. When installing new parquet
flooring, stainless steel headless pins are used to prevent this problem from
occurring in the future.
Why it is important to hire a professional?
With the ever increasing number of DIY
shows on television, a lot of people are attempting to restore their own wood
floors only to find it's not as easy as it looks on telly. Professional wooden
floor restoration companies will have invested in the right machinery for the
job and also in the right training.
Having no experience and using machines
which are not forgiving can cause extreme damage to your wood floor and can
reduce its life by as much as 50% so it is important to employ a company whose
employees are fully trained and qualified in wood floor restoration. This will
ensure that the smallest amount of wood is removed during the sanding process
and will therefore extend the life of your floor.
Hiring a professional to do the job will
leave you with the perfect finish and may even end up saving you money, after
all it would be a lot more expensive to attempt the job yourself, hire the
machines, buy the sand paper and finishing materials, only to then have to hire
in the professionals to redo the job afterward because you are unhappy with the
finish.
What should a person look for when choosing
a flooring supplier?
When looking for a company to supply and
fit your flooring, you should look for a company that can prove the quality of
their work. Ask to see examples of their work or at least pictures of it and
ask them to produce genuine testimonials.
Ask to see proof of their qualifications.
Properly qualified UK flooring contractors will have passed City & Guilds
NVQ Level 2 in floor coverings and should have passed there health & safety
test and hold a valid CSCS card for commercial works.
Check out the equipment they plan to use
and ask what measures they put in place to minimise dust, the last thing you
want is to be cleaning the house for weeks after they've gone.
Confirm that they offer a free
no-obligation survey and quotation.
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