Wood floors can be great for a growing family as they are easy to clean and arguably much more hygienic than carpets.
In fact, children growing up in homes with wooden floors are less likely to have allergies or asthma triggered as they don’t harbour dust and allergens.
One of the problems is that they can be easy to mark, and as wooden floors aren’t cheap, stains can be an expensive and upsetting mistake to make.
Follow these tips to avoid as much child damage as possible to your floors:
- Wipe up spills immediately
Spills are one of the quickest ways to damage your floors but can be avoided if you wipe them up immediately. Even water marks can be long lasting so do this with all liquids spilled on your floors.
- Use a varnish
Another way to avoid damage is to seal your floors with a specific, hardwearing varnish so that stains are less likely to sink into the wood and cause irreversible damage. Varnishes can be clear so they show up the natural beauty of the wood or then can be coloured. Darker colours will be more forgiving of the marks left by children.
- Don’t wear shoes
If you aren’t a no-shoes indoors household then you should make sure you become one. Grit and dirt from outside can lead to scratching of your wooden floors, and is also less hygienic.
- Use mats and pads
Staining from food is a particularly bad problem and one that anybody who has had to wean an infant will have experienced. If you have babies or young children it may be pertinent to consider investing in some kind of plastic matting to place under their chair or even the entire area as food can be flung a long way!
- Use furniture coasters
These are great for avoiding deep marks to your wooden floors as they sit under the legs and stop these imprinting on the wooden floors. These should be added to all furniture including any new children’s furniture or large toys no matter how lightweight and small they seem.
- Use specific floor cleaning products
While you don’t need anything particularly unusual to clean floors, it is a good idea to use specific floor cleaners to avoid any unnecessary abrasions to your floor. Floor cleaners are milder detergents than some other cleaning products and will remove dirt while minimising the impact on the wood.
- Get scratches fixed fast
Deep scratches, if they do happen, should be attended to fast. This is as deep scratches can attract dirt which will make the scratch look even worse. Large scratches should be filled or professionally attended to asap so that this doesn’t happen. You also need to make sure that the scratch isn’t large enough to compromise the integrity of the floorboard which could happen if the scratch is near to the edge of the floorboard or the floorboard is particularly old or affected by woodworm.
If you’re in need of wood floor sanding specialists, get in touch with Mitchell Flooring today.