Hardwood Floor Cleaning in Riverstone, TX
Watering your foundation in August is genuinely good advice, and doing it badly moves the slab more than not doing it at all.
Fort Bend County sits on soil with a high clay fraction, and clay in this part of the world changes volume dramatically with moisture. It swells when it is wet and shrinks hard when it dries, and a slab sitting on it goes along for the ride.
Everybody in Avalon, Waterside, Providence, The Orchard, and the rest of Riverstone has heard the advice about running soaker hoses around the foundation during a dry summer. It is sound advice and it is very often carried out in a way that makes things worse.
The floor upstairs is what registers the result.
Why Even Matters More Than Wet
A slab is only in trouble when different parts of it are supported differently. Uniformly damp soil all the way around is fine. Uniformly dry soil all the way around is survivable. Wet on the shaded north side and bone dry on the sun-baked west side is what cracks slabs, and that is exactly what happens when somebody runs a soaker hose on two sides of the house because those are the sides with a spigot.
Doing It Properly
Hose laid a foot to eighteen inches out from the foundation, not against it. All the way around, including the side nobody looks at. Short and frequent instead of long and occasional, so the moisture stays even instead of cycling. Start before the ground has opened up, not once cracks have appeared, because rewetting soil that has already pulled away from the slab causes its own movement. A cheap timer does more for this than any amount of good intention.
What Slab Movement Does Upstairs
A floor follows its subfloor. When one corner of a slab drops relative to the rest, the wood above it opens at the seams in that zone, and if the movement reverses in winter the boards press back together and crush their own edges. Households read that as a flooring defect and get quoted for flooring work when the cause is in the ground. A door that has started sticking in the same season is usually the confirming clue.
Where This Leaves the Cleaning
A floor that is moving with the seasons still benefits from having film taken off and a protective coat put on, and it will keep moving. Cleaning does not close a gap, flatten a board, or repair a crushed edge. If the movement is severe enough to be visible from across a room, the useful order is a foundation engineer first and a floor conversation second, and we would sooner say that than take a booking that solves nothing.
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 Riverstone
Riverstone: 281-969-3290, or the form on this page. New customers get fifty dollars taken off the job.
Areas we cover around Riverstone
Neighborhoods: Avalon, Brazos Landing, Waterside, Providence, Auburn Manor, The Orchard, Creekstone Village, Ivory Ridge, Prestwick, Shadow Glen
Zip codes: 77459, 77479
Hardwood questions from Riverstone homeowners
How much water are we talking about?
Enough to keep the soil damp a few inches down and no more. The goal is stability, not saturation, and standing water against a foundation causes its own problems including drawing termites toward the house.
Do the big trees near the house matter?
Considerably. A mature tree pulls a great deal of moisture out of the soil within its root zone, which is usually wider than the canopy. It is one of the most common reasons one corner of a slab behaves differently from the rest.
Our gaps close up completely every summer. Is that a problem?
Seasonal closing is normal. Gaps closing so completely that board edges are compressed against each other is not, and it points either at humidity or at a floor with no expansion space at the perimeter.
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