Hardwood Floor Cleaning in Irmo, SC
The orange cast on a Dutch Fork floor is not the color of the wood. It is the color the finish turned, and it has been turning that way since about 1988.
Irmo built out through the 1980s and 1990s, and the standard floor finish of that era was oil-modified polyurethane. It went on almost water-clear with a faint honey tone.
Oil-modified poly ambers. It is a chemical property of the resin and it happens whether the floor is walked on or not, accelerating in sunlight and continuing quietly in the dark. Forty years in, the finish over your red oak has gone distinctly orange, and the oak underneath has not changed at all.
People call us about this thinking the floor is dirty. It is worth knowing what it is before you spend money trying to clean a color off.
Proving It to Yourself
Unscrew a floor register and look at the underside of the metal frame area, or pull the shoe moulding in a closet, or lift a threshold strip. Anywhere the finish has been shielded from light shows you what the original tone was, and the difference in a Friarsgate or Chestnut Hill house is usually two or three shades. That is the finish aging, not the floor getting dirty.
What Cleaning Changes and What It Does Not
Cleaning takes off the product film and the grime, and the improvement in clarity is real and often large. The amber stays, because it is inside the coating. What frequently surprises people is that they end up liking the floor once the haze is gone, since a warm tone on oak reads as character where a dull warm tone reads as neglect.
The Only Way to Remove the Color
Sanding back to bare wood and refinishing with a water-based product, which stays clear for its life. That is a full refinishing job, it is a different trade from ours, and it costs many times what maintaining the floor costs. It is also the correct answer for anybody who genuinely cannot live with the tone, and we will say so instead of pretending our coat will fix it.
Harbison and the Traffic Question
Separate from color, these floors are forty years into their finish and some of them are getting thin in the lanes. Amber is cosmetic. Thin is not. Do the water-drop check in the busiest doorway, and if the drop flattens instead of beading, the color is the least of what is going on.
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 Irmo
Get us on (803) 302-7949 or use the form, and take $50 off the first cleaning. Worth doing the register check before you call.
Areas we cover around Irmo
Neighborhoods: Harbison, Dutch Fork, Friarsgate, Chestnut Hill Plantation, Ballentine, Ascot, Belfair Oaks, Foxboro
Zip codes: 29063
Hardwood questions from Irmo homeowners
Will your maintenance coat make the orange worse?
No. It is water-based and stays clear, so it adds no color of its own and it does not amber over time the way the coating underneath did.
Would bleaching the floor lighten it?
Bleaching acts on the wood, and the wood is not the problem here. It also has to follow a full sanding. Nothing applied over the existing finish will change the finish's own color.
Our floor is patchy, orange in some rooms and lighter in others. Why?
Sunlight. Rooms with more glass and more direct exposure amber faster, and a room that has had a large rug in it for twenty years will have a pale rectangle under it for the same reason.
Is a 1990s floor thick enough to sand?
If it is solid three-quarter-inch oak, usually yes and probably more than once. If it is engineered, which some of the later Irmo builds are, generally not. Check at a register before anyone quotes you for sanding.
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