Make Sure Your Flooring Service Avoids These 5 Hardwood Sanding Mistakes

If you own a beautiful hardwood floor at home, then the necessity to periodically sand and refinish them is a recurrent headache. Hardwood floors are a classic home furnishing statement and have remained timelessly popular. But if you do not want your precious timber floors to lose their shine, then you need to sand and refinish them frequently. Word to the wise, sanding hardwood floors is a task best left to the professionals. It is easy to commit errors when you are sanding a beautiful wooden floor.

Often the best professionals commit minor errors that prevent the sanding and refinish from providing the full effect. So when you hire a professional flooring service, make sure they are not committing the following mistakes:

i.    Choosing the wrong grit of sandpaper

Selecting an unsuitable grit of sandpaper can cause irreversible damage to your treasured hardwood floors. If the grits on the sandpaper are smaller than the requirement, then your floors may not be sufficiently scrubbed and polished. Choosing a grit size larger than your requirement can also result in unsavoury marks on your smooth hardwood floors.

For a first-time sanding, 24-grit size sandpaper is adequate. Homeowners must always confirm what grade of sandpaper they require during the hardwood floor installation. It is a stitch in time which will save you from the heartbreak of a ruined, expensive timber floor.

ii.     Insufficient sanding

Trustfully speaking, floor sanding is a time-consuming job. It is why a lot of unprofessional sanding services try to cut corners when the inexperienced customer is impatient for the final result. Hence, if you want to get value for your money, then you should ensure that your flooring service is sanding your floors sufficiently.

Proper sanding helps scrub the dirt and the old varnish off floorboards that are not flat, somewhat concave or convexly bent. The sanding machine must reach these deep nooks and crannies if you want to avoid dark gradients on your floorboards after a fresh coat of varnish.

iii.    Not sanding diagonally

The sanding strokes also matter if you want the process to yield a more beautiful hardwood floor than before. For that, you must guarantee that the flooring service is sanding the floors diagonally, after sanding in straight lines.

Sanding hardwood floors diagonally helps one reach the deep pockets where dirt has crept. The spots that are difficult to reach during the perpendicular sanding runs become more accessible this way.

iv.    Not paying attention to the room edges

As satisfying it is to watch the floorboards fit symmetrically during the hardwood floor installation, it is twice as challenging to sand them! If you inspect closely, then you will find that the majority of the dirt and grime settle at the edges of the room.

Unfortunately, the edges of a room are difficult to reach with a sanding machine. Hence, being thorough with a sanding paper along the sides of the room is doubly essential.

v.    Switching sandpapers

If you want your hardwood floors to be appropriately sanded, then you cannot risk retaining a budget for sandpaper. The grits on sandpaper wear out after successive runs on the floors. So as the customer, you must ensure that the flooring service you employ have as much sandpaper as they require for skinning your timber floors.

Paying close attention and communicating with what your flooring services need for best practices usually helps avoid these mistakes.