How to Save Money by Protecting Your Wood Flooring

If you were lucky enough to inherit wood flooring in a used home, you certainly don’t want to have the face the expense of significant repair, much less replacement. If you are wealthy enough to build a new home with hardwood floors, you probably don’t want to save the money that would otherwise go to repair or replacement to fund some sort of addition for the purpose pecuniary emulation. Either way, the advantages of taking precautionary steps against potentially expensive repairs to wood flooring far outweigh the disadvantage of doing nothing until it is too late.

Door Mats

Forget those decorative door mats used for the purpose of welcoming visitors to your home. Invest in high quality mats and place them at every entrance into your home. Get a big, thick mat of firm bristles and aggressively insist that everyone who enters your home actually use them to brush off the soles of their shoes. Those soles are magnets for all manner of gritty materials with the potential to wreak havoc on your wood floors. The bottom of shoes make more comprehensive contact with your hardwood floors than anything else in the house and the outdoor stuff that accumulates on the bottom of shoes is constant irritant to the quality of that wood.

Mold

Remove existing mold from your wood floors by using a disinfectant solvent. After the mold has been removed, give the floor a solid waxing. And then protect against the recurrence of damaging mold by improving the environment in the area where the mold grew. Mold requires a moist environment so take steps to dry out that part of the house. Add lights that provide more heat to the area. Open windows or air conditioner vents to provide better circulation. Any precaution you can take against the growth of mold on your wood floors should be taken to prevent potentially catastrophic damage.

Christmas Trees

Nothing says traditional Christmas like a tree situated on a lovely hardwood floor. Unfortunately, the sap from a Christmas tree can accumulate on your wood surface over the course of the holidays has the power to mar both the beauty of the wood’s sheen and its durability. An easy and convenient way to avoid this Christmas tradition can be found in your kitchen pantry. Vegetable shortening like Crisco can be applied to break it up and then cleaned away with a paper towel.

Rocking Chairs

If your house is equipped with hardwood floors, chances are you may have a rocking chair. The squeak of an old rocking chair against wooden floors may lend a certain sense of comforting familiarity to the home, but over time that squeak can signal damage. Protection against long-term damage to your wood flooring by rocking chairs can be achieved by applying either a strip of tape to curved leg or an adhesive strip of felt padding.