Hardwood Floor Cleaning in St. Andrews, SC
Everybody has heard the story about pulling up carpet and finding beautiful oak. In houses built during the carpet years, that is often not what is under there.
It is a real phenomenon and it happens constantly in prewar and early postwar houses, where wall-to-wall went down over a finished oak floor that had been the intended surface all along.
St. Andrews mostly built later than that. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, carpet was not covering the floor, carpet was the floor, and builders specified accordingly. What is underneath is frequently plywood, particleboard, or a low-grade utility oak that was never sanded or finished because nobody was ever going to see it.
How to Find Out Before You Commit
Pull the carpet up in a closet corner, which takes five minutes and costs nothing. If you find a finished floor with a visible sheen, even a filthy one, you have something. If you find bare, unfinished wood with staple holes and no finish anywhere, or a sheet material with a printed grain, that is a subfloor and it was always a subfloor.
The Middle Case, Which Is the Common One
Sometimes there is real oak but it is builder-grade shorts, laid quickly, with a lot of color variation and knots because it was cheap when it went down. That can be sanded and finished into a decent floor by a refinisher, and it will never look like a 1920s quartersawn floor no matter what anybody does. Going in with accurate expectations is the difference between being pleased and being disappointed by the same result.
Where We Fit
If there is a finished floor under the carpet, we clean and coat it, and the results on a floor that has been protected for forty years are frequently the best we see. If it is bare unfinished wood, cleaning is the wrong service. Bare wood needs sanding and finishing by somebody who does that, and putting a maintenance coat on raw wood is not a shortcut to a finished floor.
What the Carpet Left Behind
Tack strip nail holes around the perimeter of every room, staple holes across the field where the pad was fixed, and pad residue bonded to whatever finish exists. The nail holes stay and they sit in the baseboard shadow where almost nobody sees them. The residue comes off, and getting it off is usually the whole job.
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 St. Andrews
Pull back a closet corner first. It answers the question for free and it will tell you which trade to call.
We are on 803-310-3848 and the site takes bookings. New customers get $50 off.
Areas we cover around St. Andrews
Neighborhoods: St. Andrews, Bush River area, Broad River corridor
Zip codes: 29210
Hardwood questions from St. Andrews homeowners
The wood under our carpet looks gray and rough. Is that dirt?
Usually oxidation on unfinished wood, which is what bare oak does over decades of air exposure. It sands off easily but it does not clean off, and that tells you the floor was never finished.
Is there any point in cleaning a subfloor?
None, and we will not charge you for it. If you are going to live on it, it needs finishing properly.
We found finished oak but it has black stains near the bathroom. Can you get those out?
No. Black in the grain is water that reacted with the wood, and it goes as deep as the water went. A refinisher can sometimes bleach it after sanding, with mixed results.
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Schedule your St. Andrews hardwood floor cleaning
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