Hardwood Floor Care and Maintenance

For our first take we would like to talk to you a little about hardwood floor care and maintenance.  Properly caring for a hardwood floor has truly never been easier, IF, you know what to look for and what to use.  There are a lot of misleading products and ads out there, for instance the Shark floor steam, spray and mop products.  When I see the commercial on TV it honestly makes me cringe.  How many people are going to be misled by that commercial and buy the steamer for their hardwood or laminate floors?  Whatever the number, the answer is too many.

A hardwood floor or flooring that is produced based on a wood platform such as engineered hardwood and laminate are prone to expansion and contraction with changes in temperature and variation in moisture.  Any water that penetrates the surface wear layer (protection layer) of the flooring or seeps between the seams of the floor boards has the potential to damage or even destroy a floor.  As wood gets wet it expands and, with nowhere to go, will buckle, cup, or warp a floor.  The Shark product is literally injecting steam (moisture) into your flooring.  How they are able to advertise and market the product the way they do is a mystery to me because it seems more like something that is designed to destroy a floor than care for it.

To care for your floor properly don’t fall for the gimmicks, it’s really a very simple task.  Vacuum or sweep your floor periodically, and use a designed floor cleaner with a microfiber mop head.  This is not a traditional mop, do not actually put any water on your floor, please!  It will come with a spray bottle to spray the floor and mop.  The small amount of moisture produced by a spray bottle and then mopped up right away is not enough to damage the floor and helps the microfiber cloth effectively remove remaining dirt and debris from the floor surface (that was not taken up during sweeping or vacuuming).

The two products we currently recommend are Bona and Armstrong / Bruce, although there have been a lot of recent complaints about the Armstrong / Bruce mop that is included with their kit.  These products can be found it floor kits that will provide the cleaning solution, the mop and the microfiber cloth.  The easiest available option is on Amazon.com.

For Bona you can copy and paste the below text into the amazon search bar, the kit is about $22.00.

BonaKemi WM710013358 4-Piece Hardwood Floor-Care System

Please do not hesitate to email us (info@hudsoncarpet.com) with questions or concerns about your floor.