Hardwood Floor Cleaning in Aldine, TX
Before you pull the carpet up hoping for oak underneath, there are four things to check that take about ten minutes.
The housing along Aldine-Westfield, Airline, and the older streets of Aldine goes back to the forties and fifties, and a great deal of it was built with wood floors that got carpeted over somewhere around 1975. Every few weeks somebody in this part of the county pulls back a corner, sees oak, and calls a floor company that afternoon.
Sometimes that is a very good day. Sometimes the floor under the carpet is not what the owner hoped and the money would have been better spent elsewhere.
The difference is knowable in advance and it does not take a professional.
Check One: Is It Actually a Finish Floor
Houses of this era sometimes have a plank subfloor and no finish floor at all, laid on the diagonal with wide gaps between boards and never intended to be seen. Finish flooring is narrow, tight, runs parallel to the long wall of the room, and has a tongue-and-groove edge. A diagonal layout with visible gaps and rough sawn faces is a subfloor, and it is not going to become a floor without a great deal of work.
Check Two: What Is Stuck to It
Look at the exposed corner in strong light. Tack strip along the perimeter leaves a line of small nail holes, which almost always ends up hidden by quarter round and is not a problem. Carpet pad that has degraded into a sticky orange film is a problem, because it has to come off before anything else. Adhesive from a glued-down carpet is the worst case and it is often the point at which the project stops making sense.
Check Three: How Much Wood Is Left
Pull a floor register and look at the board in section, or check the threshold at a doorway. If the tongue is close to the surface or the flooring nails are showing at the board edges, the floor has already been sanded as far as it can go. That does not rule out cleaning and coating, and it does rule out any plan that involves refinishing later.
Check Four: The Wet Spots
Look at the perimeter of the room, at the wall the bathroom shares, and along any exterior door. Carpet hides a lot and it also holds water against the floor, so any past leak has usually left a dark mark or a cupped board where the carpet kept it wet. Those areas do not recover. Finding them before you commit to the project is the whole point of looking first.
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 Aldine
Pull one corner in a closet before you commit to pulling the whole room. It costs nothing and it answers most of the question.
Aldine is covered from 281-786-4379 and through the booking form here. First job, fifty dollars off.
Areas we cover around Aldine
Neighborhoods: Aldine, Airline, East Aldine, Aldine-Westfield, Highlands-area
Zip codes: 77037, 77039, 77060, 77076
Hardwood questions from Aldine homeowners
Can you clean a floor the day the carpet comes out?
If it is clear of pad, staples, and tack strip, yes. Removing all of that is not part of what we do, and having a floor properly stripped and vacuumed before we arrive makes the visit straightforward.
The wood looks dry and gray. Is it ruined?
Usually not. A floor that has been under carpet for decades with a worn-out finish looks lifeless because there is no film on it at all. That makes it a refinishing candidate and not a cleaning one, and we will say so instead of coating bare wood.
There are dark patches where furniture stood.
Could be shading, could be a spill that soaked through the carpet. Shading evens out over months of light exposure. Something that reached the wood does not, and no cleaning brings it back.
Is it worth doing at all in a house we plan to sell?
If what you uncover is a sound finished floor, yes, easily. If it is bare, gray, and stained, you are looking at a refinishing bill and the honest comparison is against new flooring.
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Schedule your Aldine hardwood floor cleaning
Prefer to talk it through first? Call 281-786-4379. Otherwise, pick a time below.
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