Hardwood Floor Cleaning in Augusta, GA
The old houses on the Hill were built up on brick piers to get the air moving under them, and that decision is still shaping how their floors behave two hundred years later.
Summerville exists because people came up off the river in summer, and the houses were built for that: high piers, deep porches, tall windows, and a wide gap of open air between the ground and the floor joists.
It worked. What it also means is that the underside of those floors has always been outdoors. There is conditioned air at fifty percent humidity on the top of every board and Augusta summer air at eighty-five percent underneath it.
Wood equalizes with both. That single fact explains most of what people call us about in these houses, and it explains why the same advice that works in a slab house on the west side is wrong here.
Reading a Raised Floor
In late summer the boards take up moisture from below and swell, and the edges lift a fraction into a shallow cup. In January the heat comes on, the wood dries, and the seams open. Neither is damage on its own and both reverse. What is not normal is a floor that stays cupped through winter, and that is the signal that the ground under the house is wet enough to need attention before anybody spends money on the surface.
Why We Do Not Mop These Floors
On a floor already taking moisture from underneath, adding water on top is the one thing you can do that makes the situation worse in both directions. Our solution is metered out and pulled back in the same pass, so nothing stands in a seam and nothing reaches the underside. That method exists for exactly this housing stock, not as a selling point.
Heart Pine and How Much Is Left
The floors in Summerville and The Hill are largely old-growth longleaf pine, cut when the trees were centuries old, and it is denser and finer-grained than anything sold as pine now. Most of these have been sanded once or twice already. Every pass takes a thickness that never comes back, so on these houses a service that removes nothing is worth considerably more than it is on a modern floor.
The Newer Half of Town
National Hills, Forest Hills, Montclair, and the postwar streets are a different proposition: slab or shallow crawlspace, site-finished oak from the fifties and sixties, and a lot of it recently uncovered from carpet. Those floors are usually in far better shape than their owners assume, and the whole job is removing the pad residue and the product film that went on afterwards.
Not sure whether your floor needs cleaning or refinishing? There are three tests you can run yourself in about a minute, and they will tell you which one you are dealing with before anyone quotes you.
Hardwood problems we handle in Augusta
If you are trying to decide between cleaning and refinishing on a Summerville floor, measure what is left before you decide anything. It is a five-minute job at a register and it usually settles the question.
The Augusta number is 762-222-4728, and the site takes bookings any time. $50 off the first cleaning.
Areas we cover around Augusta
Neighborhoods: Summerville, The Hill, National Hills, West Augusta, Forest Hills, Montclair, Harrisburg, Daniel Village, Augusta Exchange
Zip codes: 30901, 30904, 30905, 30906, 30907, 30909
Hardwood questions from Augusta homeowners
Our floors cup every August. Is the house failing?
Almost certainly not. Seasonal movement is what a raised floor does here. Take a look under the house: if the ground is bare dirt with no vapor barrier, laying plastic down is cheap and it makes a real difference upstairs.
Should we close the crawlspace vents in summer?
Opinions differ and it depends on the house. What is not in doubt is that ground cover under a raised house helps, and that a dirt crawlspace in Augusta is putting a lot of water into the air your floor is standing on.
How many times can heart pine be sanded?
It depends entirely on what has already been taken off. A sanding contractor can tell you by measuring at a floor register or a doorway. If the tongue is close to the surface, the answer is none, and cleaning becomes the only sensible route.
Do the wide gaps between boards need filling?
Filling gaps on a floor that moves seasonally usually ends with the filler squeezed out or cracked by spring. Most people who have lived with one of these houses for a while decide the gaps are part of it.
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