Hardwood Floor Cleaning in Allen, TX
If your floor is that deep reddish brown that everybody put in around 2004, it is probably not oak, and what it is changes what should be done to it.
Allen built out through exactly the years when the flooring trade in North Texas went exotic. Brazilian cherry was the fashionable choice, tigerwood turned up in the higher-end houses, acacia arrived a little later, and a great many Twin Creeks and Villages houses have one of them on the ground floor.
Homeowners generally know the floor is something special and generally do not know what. That is a problem, because these species do not behave like domestic oak. They are denser, they move differently, several of them photodarken dramatically over time, and some of them were installed with an oil finish instead of a urethane.
The oil finish is the part worth pinning down before anyone touches the floor, because an oil-finished floor and a urethane-finished floor need opposite things.
How to Work Out Which Finish You Have
Find an out-of-the-way patch, a closet or under a piece of furniture, and put a single drop of water on it. Leave it two or three minutes and look. A urethane finish holds the drop as a bead sitting proud on the surface. An oil finish lets it flatten out and start to darken the wood beneath it, and the mark disappears again as it dries. That second result means the finish lives in the wood, not over it, and it wants to be maintained with oil, not coated over.
Brazilian Cherry Darkens, and It Is Not Dirt
Jatoba changes color substantially with light exposure, and most of that change happens in the first two or three years. A floor that started orange-brown ends up a deep red-brown. If a rug went down in year one and came up in year eight, there is a pale rectangle underneath it that is not a stain and will not clean out. It will slowly even up over a couple of years once the rug is gone, which is the only remedy there is.
Why Density Matters to the Cleaning
Jatoba is roughly twice as hard as red oak. That is excellent news for scratches and it means something specific for us: an extremely hard, tight-grained surface holds very little, so a residue film sits on top as a distinct layer and comes off cleanly and completely. The before and after on a well-kept Brazilian cherry floor is one of the more striking things in this trade, because there is so little grain texture hiding what the film was doing.
What Stays Regardless of Species
We do not sand, refinish, or re-stain any of it. Scuffs, gray traffic film, and product buildup come off. A gouge you can catch a fingernail in stays, and on a dark exotic floor it will show as a pale line because the wood underneath the surface is much lighter than the aged face. Black pet staining, dents, and worn-through areas also stay. On these species that news is easier to take, since the floors are hard enough that genuine damage is rarer than on oak.
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 Allen
The single most useful thing you can do before booking anything is the water drop test in a closet. It takes three minutes and it tells you which of two entirely different maintenance paths your floor is on.
Once you know, call 945-215-7071 and we will take it from there. $50 off the first clean.
Areas we cover around Allen
Neighborhoods: Twin Creeks, Watters Creek, Allen Station, The Villages
Zip codes: 75002, 75013
Hardwood questions from Allen homeowners
Can you tell me what species I have?
Usually, from the grain and the color, and the vent-cover edge tells us whether it is solid or engineered. We are not going to guess if it is ambiguous. What matters more than the species name is the finish type, and that we can establish for certain on the day.
Do you clean oil-finished floors?
We will look and tell you honestly. An oil-finished floor generally wants cleaning and re-oiling with a compatible product, and putting a water-based coat over one is not the right move. If that is what you have, we would rather say so and point you the right way than take the job.
Which areas does the Allen crew cover?
Allen including Twin Creeks, Watters Creek, Allen Station, and The Villages, plus Dallas, Plano, McKinney, Frisco, Wylie, and Richardson.
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