Hardwood Floor Cleaning in Pilot Point, TX
Small dark dots in a regular pattern down the length of your boards are nail heads, and they are telling you how much floor you have left.
Pilot Point has genuine old housing stock around the square and out on the horse properties, and a good deal of it has original solid wood that has been down for the better part of a century. On those floors, the fasteners occasionally become visible, and it is worth understanding what that means because it is the single best indicator of the floor's remaining life.
A strip floor is normally blind-nailed, meaning the nail goes in at an angle through the tongue on the side of the board and is completely hidden by the next board. You should never see a fastener. If you can see them, one of two things has happened.
Either somebody face-nailed the boards down at some point, usually to stop movement or a squeak, or the floor has been sanded enough times that the surface has come down to meet the blind nails.
How to Tell the Two Apart
Face nails are set deliberately and they look it: two per board near the ends, or a regular line along a repaired area, often with a small filled dimple around each one. Nails exposed by sanding appear in the middle of the board width, at the tongue line, at irregular intervals, and usually only in the parts of the floor that have been sanded hardest. The second is the one that matters.
What It Means for Refinishing
If a sander has reached the nails, the floor is at or very near the end of what it can be sanded. Taking it down further means hitting steel with an abrasive, which destroys the abrasive and tears the floor. In practical terms, a floor showing nail heads from sanding has no further refinishing available to it, and everything from that point onward is about preserving the finish that is on it.
Which Is Exactly Why Cleaning Matters More Here
On a floor with sanding left, a maintenance service is a way of postponing an option you still have. On a floor with none left, it is the only option there is. The protective coat takes the abrasion so the remaining finish does not, and when the coat wears it gets removed and replaced. That cycle can be repeated indefinitely, which is more than can be said for sanding.
The Other Things Old Floors Show
Dark rings around exposed nail heads, where iron has reacted with the tannin in oak and stained the wood blue-black. Gaps that have been filled at some point with something rigid, which has since cracked out. Boards that have been replaced with a different piece of timber and never matched. None of these clean out, and all of them are ordinary features of a hundred-year-old floor. We point them out so you know what is permanent.
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 Pilot Point
Get down and look at a board in your oldest room. Whether you can see fasteners changes what your floor's future looks like, and it is free information.
Then call 940-220-8158 and we will help you get the most out of what is left. $50 off the first cleaning.
Areas we cover around Pilot Point
Neighborhoods: Mobberly Farms, Creekview Meadows, Creekview Fossil Ridge, Estates at Yarbrough Farms, The Hills at Pilot Point, Bryson Ranch
Zip codes: 76258
Hardwood questions from Pilot Point homeowners
Should I be worried if I can see nail heads?
Not worried, informed. The floor is structurally fine and it will carry on doing its job. What has changed is that refinishing is off the table, so the maintenance decisions matter more than they would on a newer floor.
Can the dark rings around the nails be removed?
No. That is iron tannate formed inside the wood, and there is nothing that reaches it through an intact finish. It is a characteristic of old floors and most people come to see it as part of the character once they know it is not dirt.
Which areas does the crew serve?
Pilot Point including Mobberly Farms, Creekview Meadows, Creekview Fossil Ridge, Estates at Yarbrough Farms, The Hills at Pilot Point, and Bryson Ranch, plus Aubrey, Krugerville, Providence Village, Cross Roads, Celina, and Sanger.
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Schedule your Pilot Point hardwood floor cleaning
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