Hardwood Floor Repair Techniques

Hardwood floors can get messed up in so many ways and despite the fact that most of them come with a “should last 40 years” sticker next to them, they rarely get the chance to light so many candles on the cake, mainly because a lot of external factors intervene in the health of your flooring. 

Sure, if your house would be a perfectly void environment where people rarely use the floor, keeping your current hardwood floor for 40 years wouldn’t be a problem, but seeing how you’ll most likely be moving furniture, walking all over the place, dropping stuff on the floor and the likes, bad stuff WILL happen to your hardwood floor.

 
But replacing your floor complete is often not the best way to work around the problem, either because it’s expensive, too much work and discomfort, or simply because it’s unreasonable. 

After all, even if you have money pouring from a faucet in the wall, you probably still wouldn’t replace your 1 year old hardwood floor just because you dropped something on it and it left a few scratches. This is when learning how to repair hardwood floors really starts paying off.

 
The thing with repairing hardwood floors is that you don’t have a magical formula to fix all problems. Each of the problems that may occur with your floor need to be tackled individually and for the most part, using a specific hardwood floor repair technique. For example:
 

• Scratches – smaller scratches are easy to cope with and you can use a simple color putty stick to handle them. Just clean the scratch thoroughly, apply the stick over the damage and you’re done!



• Gouges – gouges are essentially scratches that went the extra mile. A gouge won’t be covered up by the magical putty stick and you’ll need some wood filler that matches your floor’s color.



• Gaps – gaps usually form after a while, when the hardwood floor’s panels drift apart slightly. Gaps can be tightened down using a special tool, but usually they tend to be overlooked unless they’re really a problem (for example when you can fit a dime between your panels, you know you have a problem…)



• Buckling planks – planks buckle upwards from exactly the opposite reason that gaps form. Gaps form because wood shrinks when it dries out, but when it gets in touch with water, it expands.
  
  So if you live in a humid area or if you drop water on the floor, your hardwood planks will buckle up creating discomfort and possibly a dangerous trap in the floor. You can work around this problem by applying a weight over the buckled area for a couple of days.