Hardwood Floor Cleaning in Little Mountain, SC
Those fine lines running the length of the boards are not scratches and nobody put them there. The floor made them itself, and it usually happens in February.
Surface checking is what a wood floor does when it dries out too far, too fast. The board shrinks, the finish on top of it does not shrink at the same rate, and something has to give. What gives is a hairline split following the grain, generally short, generally in groups.
People find them, assume somebody dragged something, and start looking for the culprit. There is no culprit. There is a humidity number.
Telling Checking From a Scratch
A scratch crosses the grain as often as it follows it, and it goes wherever the object went, including over the joint between two boards. Checking always follows the grain, always stops at the end of a board, and never crosses a seam. Look at a group of them and you will see they line up with the figure in the wood, which no accidental damage ever does.
Why Winter
Heating a house drops the indoor relative humidity a long way, and a wood floor that spent August at fifty-five percent can find itself at twenty-five in January. The moisture leaves the top of the board fastest, so the top shrinks against a wetter core, and the surface splits under the tension. Houses on wood heat and houses that run a heat pump hard are the two we see it in most.
What Can Be Done
Cleaning and coating improve how much they show, because a coat sits into the split slightly and reduces the shadow line that makes it visible. It does not close them and it does not repair the board. The real fix is upstream: put humidity back into the house through the winter and the checking stops progressing. Whatever has already happened has happened.
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 Little Mountain
803-310-3848, or use the form on the site. $50 off to start, and we will tell you honestly whether what you are looking at is damage or weather.
Areas we cover around Little Mountain
Neighborhoods: Little Mountain, Newberry County
Zip codes: 29075
Hardwood questions from Little Mountain homeowners
Will the splits close up again in summer?
They narrow when the wood takes moisture back on, and they do not disappear. If they visibly change with the seasons that is confirmation of what they are.
What humidity should I hold in winter?
Forty percent or thereabouts. Under thirty is where floors start protesting, and a cheap hygrometer will tell you which side of that you are on within an hour of putting it down.
Is a checked floor structurally a problem?
No. It is a surface phenomenon and the board is doing what wood does. It matters cosmetically and it is a signal worth listening to about the air in the house.
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