Hardwood Floor Cleaning in Olmos Park, TX
The formal dining room in an Olmos Park house gets walked on four times a year, and it still ages.
There is a common assumption that a floor nobody uses stays the way it was. Owners of the big Spanish Colonial and Mediterranean houses on these streets tend to spend their money on the kitchen and the hall and leave the formal rooms alone, on the reasoning that nothing is happening in there.
Something is happening in there. It is just slower and it does not look like wear, so it goes unnoticed until a party in December puts forty people in a room that has not been examined since the last one.
Three Things That Happen to a Room Nobody Enters
A finish continues to cure and then to oxidize for its whole life, which shows up as a slow ambering that is uniform and therefore invisible until it meets a room that ambered at a different rate. Airborne cooking oil migrates through a house and settles everywhere, including on floors nobody walks on, and it is sticky enough to hold dust permanently. And a rug or a table base that has not moved in fifteen years is printing an outline into the boards through light exposure. None of the three involves a footstep.
The Party Problem
A formal room in this neighborhood takes almost no traffic for eleven months and then absorbs a year's worth in one evening, in heels, with drinks. That is the worst possible loading pattern for a coating that has been quietly hardening and getting more brittle the whole time. Scratches that a regularly used floor would have absorbed into its general condition stand out sharply on a floor that has no general condition. The maintenance coat exists precisely for this, because it takes the December evening in place of the finish.
Timing It Against the Calendar
The right time to clean a formal room is six to eight weeks before you plan to use it, which gives the maintenance coat full time to harden and gives you room to deal with anything discovered along the way. The wrong time is the week of, because rugs need to stay off for a day and heavy furniture should not be dragged back immediately. Owners who book these rooms in October are consistently happier than the ones who call the second week of December.
What the Quiet Years Have Already Cost
The ambering, the settled cooking film, and the dust bound into it all come off. The outline under a rug is light exposure in the wood and it is permanent, though evening out the sheen across the room makes it far less obvious. Also permanent: a gouge from a chair leg that catches a fingernail, a dark ring where a plant sat, and any board that has cupped. Putting a floor back to new by sanding it down and re-staining is a different trade with different equipment, and it is not ours.
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 Olmos Park
Move the dining table two feet and look at the floor where the pedestal has been. That is the honest condition report on a room you thought was untouched.
Olmos Park: 210-538-3543 gets the crew, and the form here works as well. Fifty off the first cleaning.
Areas we cover around Olmos Park
Zip codes: 78212
Hardwood questions from Olmos Park homeowners
Should the formal rooms be on the same schedule as the kitchen?
No. A kitchen in a house like this often wants annual attention while a formal dining room is fine at three or four year intervals. Paying for both on one cycle is money wasted.
Our unused room smells slightly musty. Is that the floor?
Usually it is the room, not the boards. Closed rooms with no air movement hold odor in textiles first. It is worth checking for a slow leak at an exterior wall before assuming otherwise.
Can we have just the dining room and entry done?
Yes, and we will show you which doorway the visible boundary will sit in before quoting, so you get to pick it.
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Schedule your Olmos Park hardwood floor cleaning
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