Installing or replacing high-quality floors throughout your home can be a hassle. Beyond requiring countless hours of stress and manual labor, it’s a very expensive pursuit, especially if you choose to have your floors professionally installed. Therefore, you want to do everything in your power to make sure that your floors stay healthy and damage-free for as long as possible.
With a family, however, this can be hard to do. You may view your floors as a passion project, but your children and pets certainly don’t. Heavy play, excited pets, and unpadded moving of furniture can also produce visible signs of wear on your floor. You can do your part to try to warn your family, but that only goes so far, especially with young children.
To help you save your floors for generations to come, try to incorporate as many of the guidelines detailed below.
Pad Heavy Furniture
You may not think that moving the couch a couple of inches to reach the remote underneath can cause any damage to your floors, but it certainly can. This is especially true if you don’t have pads on the bottom of your furniture, which are basically just little pieces of soft fabric that separate your furniture from the actual floor.
With these pads in place, you can move your furniture around your floors as much as you please without damaging them. You should apply these pads even to lighter furniture, as it’s often not the weight of the actual furniture that causes the damage, but, rather, the combined weight of the furniture and your added pressure (from sitting on it, pushing it around, etc).
Therefore, even loveseats and individual chairs should all be equipped with proper padding so as to ensure the minimum amount of scratching, chipping, and other forms of damage.
Reduce Rowdy Behavior on Floors
Young children probably won’t appreciate the fact that you poured your heart and soul into creating the perfect hardwood floors, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to explain to them the importance of not being rowdy in certain rooms — and therefore on certain floors.
Who knows? You may actually find that your children listen to you after all and keep their play to the appropriate rooms. If they don’t listen to you, don’t give up! Reinforce the importance of not playing on certain floors and reward them whenever they direct their play elsewhere. Don’t punish them simply for playing on a specific floor, though — they’re kids, after all.
Apply a Proper Protective Coating
A protective coating is your best friend when it comes to protecting and prolonging the life of your beloved floors. A high-quality coating can make sure that your floors stay damage-free even in the midst of chaos like furniture scraping, kids playing, and pets jumping around.
Ideally, you want to apply your protective coating when the floors are first installed. This ensures protection from day one. You can choose to do it yourself using store-bought materials, or enlist the help of a professional to make sure your floors are as secure as possible.
While the examples so far have catered to floors inside of your home, you should take care to also apply a protective coating to surfaces outside of your home. After all, when you consider things like weather and the weight of vehicles, exterior surfaces are likely to take a bigger beating in the grand scheme of things.
For example, you might do well to get yourself several driveway coatings in Jacksonville, or concrete coatings in Jacksonville, as Florida is known for its harsh rainfalls and tropical weather pattern, making its coating products as protective as they come.
Beyond driveways, you should look into garage floor coatings in Jacksonville as well. In a place where you’re likely dropping tools, moving heavy items, and spilling acidic chemicals, you want to make sure that the floors are well protected.
Reduce Pet Exposure
You may not be able to stop young children from playing on your floors, but you can certainly stop any household pets. Reducing pet exposure is actually more important when you think about it, as your pets have nails — nails that act as little scrapers against your precious floors.
To deter your pet from going into certain rooms, you can set up simple gating structures. Make sure that your gates are high enough, as dogs and cats will have no problem jumping over toddler-sized barriers.
Another option is to get footwear for your pets to wear around the house. This may sound silly, but it’s actually a lot more common than you may think, especially in fashion circles. If you have both cats and dogs, start by putting some booties on your dog. There’s a very good chance that your dog won’t like them at first, but over time, he or she will become more comfortable. With these booties on, there is a protective layer separating your dog’s nails from the floor, effectively reducing the chances of noticeable scratches or damage.
For cats, you may be better off with declawing. While you may have luck with booties, cats don’t take to footwear as well as dogs — a sign of a more intelligent creature, perhaps. If you feel bad about declawing your furry friend, you can just take care to keep your cat’s nails filed down. You can also apply this process to your dog’s nails as an alternative to booties if you wish.
Takeaway
High-quality floors are an investment. To make sure that they stick around for years to come, it’s up to you to implement the proper protective measures. Different households will be able to employ different protective measures, but generally, by padding your furniture, reducing rowdy activity on your floors, applying a proper protective coating, and reducing pet exposure, you can significantly prolong the life of your floors.
Concerning pets, in particular, you can also opt to have them wear booties in the house (this also makes for a good laugh with the family), declaw them, or keep their nails filed down to reduce the chances of scratching.