If your home has hardwood floors, there’s a good chance you already know why so many people seek them out. Hardwood floors are great returns on investment. More importantly, they can improve the look of almost any room you put them in. However, caring for hardwood floors requires some extra diligence to ensure they don’t lose their luster. Here’s how to keep your hardwood floors looking their best so that you can enjoy them for as long as possible.
Sweep Carefully
It might be difficult to believe, but the way you sweep your hardwood floors could damage them. Traditional brooms, with their stiff bristles—which are often made of plastic nowadays—can actually impart micro-scratches onto the wood, slowly degrading the floor them over time. Your best bet for keeping your hardwood floors clean is to stick with a microfiber cloth for sweeping up dust and dirt. This will ensure you don’t harm your hardwood every time you clean up.
Remove Moisture Quickly
Moisture is one of hardwood floor’s worst enemies. Depending on the kind of hardwood floor you have, moisture of any kind can be a serious issue. Prefinished hardwood floors have a coating that does protect against moisture, but the moisture can still seep into the cracks between planks. Unfinished hardwood flooring is even more susceptible to the warping effect of moisture, so clean up those spills as soon as possible.
Protect Them From Sunlight
Keeping all sunlight off your hardwood floors certainly isn’t feasible, but reducing the amount of sun exposure they get can keep your hardwood floors looking their best. This is because ultraviolet light from the sun can bleach hardwood over time. This is an even bigger problem if your floors don’t see consistent amounts of sunlight. Different parts could bleach more quickly than others over time. UV-resistant coatings for your windows can help a lot with this problem.
Felt Protectors for Furniture
One of the most common culprits of damage to hardwood floors is your furniture—usually chairs or other items that you move around more than others. The bottoms of chair and table legs can do some serious damage to hardwood if you aren’t careful. You can buy felt protector pads to attach to the bottom of furniture that will prevent the damaging contact from happening. Just make sure to check that those pads are still there and working every once and a while.