July 6, 2020

You had hardwood flooring installed at your home. Several years after they no longer look as vibrant and have minimal, light, micro scratches. Now you just want to revive your wood flooring without having to sand the floor, so what do you do?

We have encountered this numerous times over the years. Sometimes homeowners will call and tell us they don't want to have their wood floors sanded but they just want to "clean" it. We call this buffing or screening. Buffing hardwood floors is just lightly sanding off the top finish of the hardwood flooring. This process can help improve the overall look of the floor, remove light scratches and other imperfections that are just on the finish. 

However, buffing or screening hardwood flooring does not help in removing deep scratches that are on the wood. It will also not remove deep stains, dents, and gauges. To take care of all this hardwood flooring issue, we must sand the hardwood floor and refinish it by applying coats of the polyurethane finish.

Stained Damaged Hardwood Floors that will need to be sanded and refinished 

Sanding, on the other hand, is the process wherein the top layer of your hardwood flooring is sanded off with different grit of sandpaper at different phases of the process. Whether your floors can be sanded or not depends on the wear layer that your wood flooring still has. If there is no longer enough wear layer left and the engineered wood flooring is still sanded down, you expose the plywood plank and risk breaking the flooring plank. This type of restoring or rejuvenating your hardwood floors require a much more intensive work compared to just buffing the hardwood floors.

Having their hardwood floors buffed or screened is quite popular with homeowners that have wood flooring that is not so worn out...