Hardwood Flooring 101: Best Rooms, Tips for Pet-Owners, & General Maintenance

July 2, 2018

Posted in macstaff

Choosing a room for your hardwood flooring is not that difficult. Hardwood flooring can withstand almost anything that you can do with it. The grains on hardwood are beautiful and can make your home look stunning. However, your floor should not take the limelight from the room itself. Hardwood should be used to enhance not to overshadow a room. But where is hardwood flooring most effectively installed? Here are some tips that you need to consider.

The Best (and Worst) Rooms for Hardwood Flooring

Before you start planning a new hardwood flooring installation, keep in mind why you might or might not want wood floors in specific rooms.

Here are the Best Rooms for Hardwood Floors:

  • Master Suite – with its luxurious and romantic appeal, hardwood flooring will enhance the atmosphere of love in this most crucial part of your house.
  • Home Office – your office at home will also take a more professional ambiance if the full grains and striking colors of hardwood adorn its floor.
  • Dining Room – hardwood flooring is also a choice floor for dining rooms. It will lend its characteristics to whatever atmosphere you want to imbue in this section of your house. If you want a more casual ambiance, you can choose thin-grained and light colored hardwood. But if you want a more elegant and formal appeal, choose wood species with concentrated grains and darker colors.
  • Living Room – you can also install hardwood flooring on your living room. With its wonderful play of colors and meandering wood grains, your flooring will be a conversation piece when your friends visit your place.
  • Den – you will be able to relax well with the soothing character and atmosphere that hardwood flooring will impart to your den. Reading a book, watching a TV show, or just plain relaxing on top of beautiful hardwood flooring will be something that you will always look forward to at the end of the day.

These are the Worst Rooms for Hardwood Flooring:

  • Bathroom – you cannot install hardwood flooring all over your house. There are at least two rooms where you shouldn’t install hardwood and the bathroom is one of them. Even the most durable and sturdiest exotic wood species can’t withstand the continuous onslaught of water and moisture.
  • Laundry Room – another room where you should avoid hardwood flooring for the same reason; this part of your house is exposed to the elements such as grime, dirt, spilled oil, detergents, and water — it is not the ideal domain for beautiful and expensive hardwood.

Hardwood Maintenance Tips for Pet Owners

Pets are the typical house inhabitants that do damage to house flooring. Even hardwood floors are not immune to their claws and their bites. To keep your pets from damaging your flooring, follow these simple maintenance tips:

  • Clip your dog’s nails, and your cat’s too if necessary – Dogs and cats are unusually fond of scratching the floor and to some extent. So, if you don’t clip their nails regularly, you will be the one that will ultimately pay for the damages that they will cause.
  • Get your pets their own beds – Buy an appropriate bed for each dog or cat that you own. Dogs usually sleep around twelve hours each day. Cats sleep even longer than dogs. So if you will train them to stay on their bed when sleeping, you will avoid scratches and bites on your hardwood flooring.

Step by Step: How to Get Scratches Out of Hardwood Flooring

However, if your pets have already left some scratches on your hardwood flooring, you can fix them by using a wood staining marker that will conceal the scratches. Here are the steps in using this marker.

  1. Clean the damaged spot or spots.
  2. Perform a spot test before applying the marker.
  3. If the spot test is successful, apply the concealing marker.
  4. Rub the stain into the scratches with a clean rag that is soaked with a paint thinner or mineral spirit.

Now, let us reveal how to pick the best hardwood floors for your home.