Hardwood Floor Cleaning in Peak, SC
Bamboo floors are sold alongside hardwood, cleaned like hardwood, and they are not hardwood. Half the trouble people have with them comes from that one fact.
Bamboo is a grass. What gets made into flooring is strips of it, either laid flat and glued into a plank or shredded and compressed under enormous pressure into what the trade calls strand-woven.
Strand-woven in particular is extraordinarily hard, harder than oak by a wide margin on every hardness test there is. That toughness is the selling point and it is also what makes people careless with it.
The weakness is not abrasion. It is water, and bamboo handles water worse than solid oak does, not better.
Why Moisture Is the Whole Story
A bamboo plank is held together with adhesive under compression. Water that reaches the glue lines swells the material unevenly and the plank distorts, and the distortion does not relax back the way a solid board sometimes will. Cupping on bamboo tends to be permanent, and edge swelling shows up as a raised line along every seam that catches the light from across the room.
The Scratch Paradox
Bamboo resists denting better than almost any wood floor, so people expect the finish to be equally tough. It is not. The finish on a bamboo plank is the same class of factory coating used on engineered wood, and it scratches at the same rate. Since the plank underneath is often a pale carbonized color, a scratch through the finish shows clearly. A hard floor with an ordinary finish is a common source of disappointment.
How We Handle It
Exactly the way we handle engineered plank, which is to say drier than anybody expects. Metered solution, immediate recovery, nothing left standing at a seam, and a water-based maintenance coat that gives the factory finish a wearing layer it did not come with. On a bamboo floor that coat is doing more work than usual, because once a factory finish on bamboo gives out, the next step is a new floor and not a refinish.
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 Peak
If you are not sure whether you have bamboo or a hardwood lookalike, a photo of a plank end at a doorway usually settles it.
Get the crew on 803-310-3848 or book online. $50 off the first visit.
Areas we cover around Peak
Neighborhoods: Peak, rural Newberry County
Zip codes: 29122
Hardwood questions from Peak homeowners
Can bamboo be sanded and refinished?
Strand-woven sometimes takes a light pass by a specialist, and it is difficult work because the material dulls equipment quickly and the color is not uniform through the thickness. Horizontal or vertical bamboo generally cannot. Treat it as a floor with one finish and look after that finish.
Ours has raised edges along every plank. What happened?
Moisture, almost certainly, either from mopping or from a slab underneath. That is swelling in the plank and it does not come down. Cleaning and coating still improves how it looks and will not level it.
Is a steam mop safe on bamboo?
No, and it is one of the fastest ways to destroy one. Steam drives hot water into every seam and directly at the adhesive that is holding the plank together.
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Schedule your Peak hardwood floor cleaning
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