How to Clean Hardwood Floors without Damaging Them

Hardwood floors are beautiful, and they add an elegance to your home that no other type of flooring can match. However, it is hard to keep them looking nice. Even with heavy coats of urethane to protect them, over time dust and debris can cause tiny scratches in the surface that can’t just be buffed away. It’s imperative that owners of these lovely floors know how to keep them clean in order to preserve all the qualities that make them so unique and in demand. This article will provide you with some simple tips that you can use in order to keep your hardwoods in top shape.

You’ll want to keep a soft-bristle broom handy which you can use to sweep the floors on a regular basis. No matter how hard you try, and how little you use a room, floors are going to become dusty as particles float through the air and the heating and cooling system and land on them. Walking over these particulates can cause wear on the floor. By sweeping often, you can remove a lot of the lint and dust that coat the floor and keep damage from happening. You can also vacuum a couple of times a week to remove larger particles, such as sand.

It’s important to keep water off of your floors. Clean up any liquid spills right away. Even though it’s easy to mop up the spill from the floor’s surface, over time the liquid can seep down into the cracks between the floor boards and ruin the floors. You can use a damp mop to clean them, but use as little water as possible in order to keep them clean.

Never use heavy-duty cleaners on your wood floors. They can damage the finish and the underlying layers of wood. If you need to use more than water to get a floor clean, test the cleanser you want to use on an unseen spot on the floor to see how it affects the wood. Never use cleaning products, such as ammonia, on hardwoods.

Hardwood floors are expensive, and you want to take care of them so that they will stay beautiful for many years. The two main points to remember in maintaining your floors are to keep them clean on a daily basis and to avoid using caustic cleaners that will damage the finish.