Hardwood Floor Cleaning in Hopkinsville, KY
If your floor is made of squares with the grain running four different directions, you have parquet, and almost nothing written about strip flooring applies to it.
Parquet was everywhere from the late 1950s through the 1970s, and the ranch houses around Indian Hills, Country Club Heights, and Rolling Hills have a lot of it. It arrived as tiles, usually oak, usually a foot square, made from short slats glued into a pattern.
It went down in mastic straight onto the subfloor or the slab. No nails, no tongue and groove, just adhesive and a lot of joints.
It is a handsome floor and it is genuinely harder to look after than strip oak, for reasons that come down to geometry.
The Grain Runs Every Way, and So Does the Light
Each little block within a tile has grain at ninety degrees to its neighbor. Light hitting the floor reflects differently from every block, which is what gives parquet its basketweave shimmer and why it hides some things and shows others. Dirt lodges in the joints between the slats, and there are an enormous number of those joints per square foot compared with strip flooring.
Why Water Is a Worse Idea Here
All those joints are routes down to the mastic. Water that reaches an adhesive layer softens it and lifts tiles at the corners, which is the classic failure: a floor with a dozen tiles curling up at one edge, usually starting near a door or a kitchen. Anyone who mops a parquet floor is speeding that up, and once a tile lifts, replacing it means matching a product nobody has made since 1974.
How Much Can Be Sanded
Very little. The slats are thin, and with grain running in four directions a sander cuts with the grain on half of them and against it on the other half, which is skilled work most contractors would rather not take on. That makes parquet one of the strongest cases for cleaning and coating instead of refinishing, since the alternative is usually replacement with something that will not look the same.
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 Hopkinsville
Call 270-266-1059 or use the booking form, and take $50 off the first visit. Mention that it is parquet when you call, because we plan differently for it.
Areas we cover around Hopkinsville
Neighborhoods: Downtown Hopkinsville, Indian Hills, Country Club Heights, Rolling Hills, Pembroke, Crofton
Zip codes: 42240, 42241
Hardwood questions from Hopkinsville homeowners
Some of our tiles are loose. Can you still clean the floor?
We can clean around them and we will keep liquid away from the loose edges. Re-bonding tiles is a flooring contractor's job and it is worth doing before the corners break off, because a broken corner cannot be put back.
There is a dark line around every tile. Is that dirt?
Usually yes, and it usually comes out. Decades of grit and product have packed into the joints, and lifting that is where most of the visible change in a parquet job comes from.
Ours has an old wax finish. Does that change things?
It does. Wax has to come off before any coating goes on, and a waxed parquet floor is a longer job because of the joints. It is still far less work and far less money than any of the alternatives.
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Schedule your Hopkinsville hardwood floor cleaning
Prefer to talk it through first? Call 270-266-1059. Otherwise, pick a time below.
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