Difference Between Hardwood Floor Sanding and Buffing
We have encountered this numerous times over the years. Sometimes homeowners will call and tell us they don’t want to have their wood floors sanded but they just want to “clean” them. We call this hardwood floor buffing or wood flooring screening. Buffing hardwood floors is just lightly sanding off the top finish of the hardwood flooring. This process can help improve the overall look of the floor, remove light scratches and other imperfections that are just on the finish.
However, hardwood floor buffing or screening have its limitations. It does not effectively remove deep scratches that are on the wood. It will also not remove deep stains, dents, and gauges or other hardwood floor imperfections. To take care of all this hardwood flooring issue, we recommend sanding the hardwood floor and refinishing it by applying coats of the polyurethane finish. Sanding hardwood floors, on the other hand, is the process wherein the top layer of your hardwood flooring is sanded off with different grits of sandpapers at different phases of the process. Whether your floors can be sanded or not depends on the wear layer that your wood flooring currently have. If there is no longer enough wear layer left and the engineered wood flooring is still sanded down, you expose the plywood plank and risk breaking the flooring plank. At this point it is usually when replacing your hardwood floors is recommended. This type of restoring or rejuvenating your hardwood floors requires much more intensive work compared to just buffing the hardwood floors.
Hardwood floor buffing or screening is quite a popular choice with homeowners that have wood flooring that is not so worn out and are just looking to have their floors looking fresh once again. Also, we found that buffing hardwood floors are sometimes the last recourse we can do to improve the clients’ hardwood floors, when they can no longer be sanded. After buffing the wood floors, a fresh coat of finish is applied. Clients have the option to apply as little as one coat of polyurethane finish or more depending on their preference.
As we have indicated before, hardwood floor buffing is recommended for addressing concerns that are far more superficial on the wood flooring. So depending on the extent of the issues your wood flooring might have, be prepared to opt for a much extensive hardwood flooring restoration with having to sand and refinished it instead.
So the next time that you are considering having some hardwood flooring restoration work done, figure out if buffing your wood flooring can be an alternative choice over sanding and refinishing your hardwood floors. Both can improve the overlook of your floor and potentially address wood flooring problems such as hardwood flooring dullness, scratches, dents, gauges, etc.
It is also best that a professional hardwood flooring service provider is employed. This ensures that the work is done right the first time and the homeowners are spared from any liability arising from hiring non-qualified wood flooring installers or refinishers.