Repairing Water Damaged Hardwood Floors

A freshly installed hardwood floor is designed to perfectly complement the walls and the furniture in your home. However, a hardwood floor’s worse enemy is water, which is something that our homes are exposed to nearly every day.

Whether it’s raining outside and water managed to get onto your hardwood floors or there’s a spill or leak within your house, when your wood floors are exposed to water or moisture, they are at risk of being warped and permanently damaged. If your hardwood floors get wet, don’t panic immediately!  You can repair your water damaged hardwood floors and get them back to looking almost new, depending on several factors.

How Much Water Has Affected Your Hardwood Floors?

Whether there was a tiny or a large spill on your water damaged hardwood floor, the first thing you must do to save your hardwood floor is to eliminate any excess water that has not been absorbed by the wood floor yet by simply drying your wood floor with a cloth or grabbing a water vacuum. This will reduce how much water is being absorbed by your wood floor and allows your wood floor to dry quicker.

If your wood floor only soaked in a little water, the wood floor can easily be cleaned up and will dry by itself, looking like new over time. However, if the hardwood floor is exposed to a lot of water, the hardwood floor should be treated immediately by wood floor professionals who can effectively remove the excess water and speed up the drying process. Hardwood flooring experts have industrial-sized fans that are powerful enough to dry the hardwood floor quickly and evenly without causing the wood floor to buckle. Additionally, these fans can help dry the subfloor underneath your wood floor and prevent further damage to your wood floor’s infrastructure.

Has Mold Started to Grow on Your Water Damaged Hardwood Floors?

Water damaged wood floors are the perfect places for mold to grow. The longer the water damaged wood floor is left untreated, the longer the wood floor is wet and moist, allowing mold to start accumulating and multiply on the wood’s surface. Mold on your hardwood floor not only harms your wood floor and damages how it looks in your home, but mold also reduces your home’s air quality. Contact a mold detection and removal expert to eliminate any mold growth on your wood floors before repairing your water damaged hardwood floors.

Is Your Hardwood Floor Completely Dry?

Many homeowners throughout Maryland (MD), Washington, DC and Virginia (VA) try to repair water damaged hardwood floors themselves and once they think their wood floor is dry, they believe all they have to do is refinish their hardwood floors and there wood floors will restore back to new. However, the wood floor is unlikely to be dry enough, so refinishing a hardwood floor will actually make your water damaged floor worse! Water damaged hardwood floors usually take at least several weeks or months to completely dry, even with industrial fans, because any water that has reached the subfloor needs to be dried too. Contact a wood flooring professional to figure out whether your wood floor is dry enough and is ready to be refinished.

Before you refinish your hardwood floor after water damage, it is essential to check the subfloor to see whether water has spread to this layer or not. If it has, treat the subfloor immediately to prevent it from getting worse. After you have done this and a wood flooring professional has determined that your wood floor is completely dry, then you can finally refinish your hardwood floors and get them back to looking like new!

If you live in the Maryland (MD), Washington, DC or Virginia (VA) and have water damaged hardwood floors, contact Elegant Floor Service today! We repair and refinish hardwood floors to get them back to looking like the first day you installed them.