Hardwood floors are beautiful and have a timeless beauty. However, they also see more traffic and abuse than almost any other surface in your home. Wood Rescue Team is proud to offer hardwood floor sanding and refinishing that will restore your floor’s finish and protect it from wear and tear.
Wood Rescue Team has worked with real estate agents and home renovation specialists to repair floors from pet damage, furniture moving, rippling and other problems that cause damage to hardwood floors. Very often though, problems can emerge from high humidity, and be rooted in problems with your crawl space.
Some of the most common problems we see in wood floors emerge from an excessive amount of humidity in the home. Moisture and humidity is typically related to an excess moisture in the crawlspace, and it is absorbed by wood flooring and can lead to ‘cupping’ (where the seam edges of the floor slightly curl upwards) or ‘crowning’ (where the seam edges seem lower than the center portion of each board’).
Sanding and refinishing can temporarily fix this, but without resolving the underlying issue it is only a matter of time before it reoccurs. Your issue could be related to crawl space problems, in which case you will need your crawl space inspected and possibly repaired. Visit this page to find out more about our crawl space repair services.
Do You Have Hardwood Floors?
There are several different types of ‘wood’ flooring. Let’s briefly discuss the types most commonly seen in homes, before covering some easy ways to distinguish the differences between them.
Common ‘wood’ floor types include:
- Tongue and Groove Flooring is a solid wood flooring type. This is typically ¾-inch thick, with a top layer that can be sanded and refinished multiple times during its lifetime.
- Factory Finished Flooring is also a solid wood flooring, however the manufacturer’s top layers vary in thickness, and you may be limited in the number of times you can successfully sand and refinish this type of flooring.
- Engineered Flooring can look identical to factory finish flooring, but is actually made of thin layers of wood laminate compressed and glued. This type of flooring typically has a very thin top layer of wood, and can be sanded and refinished a maximum of once in its entire lifetime.
Wood Rescue Team does not perform sanding and refinishing on this wood floor type, as thickness of the top layer can vary greatly and you can be left with a mess of a floor when you attempt it. - Vinyl or Luxury Vinyl Planks This look-a-like product is vinyl, not wood, and as such unfortunately cannot be refinished. If you are experiencing a problem with moisture, you may have a crawl space issue.
Post mid-1980s builds see more factory finished and engineered wood floor types. These are usually noticeable by the ‘micro bevel’ between boards. This is the small sliver of space between boards, a seam, where the boards meet. An easy way to test this (if you have floor vents in your home) is to gently pry a floor vent up to reveal the board edges, or inspect transition zones, where wood flooring meets carpet for example.
Let Wood Rescue Team fully evaluate your hardwood floors and provide you with a full explanation of the root cause of your flooring troubles. We carefully inspect your floors, crawl space and moisture levels to get to a real solution.
Reach out to us today for a free inspection and estimate!