Wood floor restoration is a messy and noisy job—an overall inconvenience to your home but necessary to give your floors the refresh they need. Homeowners are responsible for preparing their homes (and themselves) before floor restoration professionals arrive. This is to make everyone’s lives easier and minimize the hassle of the job, particularly cleaning up tons of sawdust.
Before the floor sanding and refinishing people come, here’s what you need to do to prepare your home.
Clear out the furniture and clutter
Remove all the furniture and items in all the areas to be restored. This is to minimize the amount of dust that gets on your belongings during the sanding process. However, if it is impossible to remove some of the larger pieces of furniture (or if you have no room to store them), let the company know in advance so that they can plan for extra time to remove or cover them with dust sheets.
Removing items from work areas can take a pretty long time, so it’s best to do this in advance and figure out where you will store the items until the job is complete. Place the frequently used items in easily accessible areas so you can get to them at any time without disrupting the work.
Remove appliances and fixtures
Take out the refrigerator and stove from the kitchen, the toilet and pedestal sinks from the bathroom, and the washer and dryer from the laundry room. Doing so will help prevent excessive accumulation of sawdust on these appliances and avoid possible damage.
Seal the pantry
If you are getting your kitchen floors done, make sure that your pantry is sealed off. Otherwise, the vapors from urethane coatings can end up on the food, leaving an unpleasant aftertaste. Take out all the food from the pantry and place them far from the work area. Alternatively, seal the door with plastic.
Remove existing flooring
Unless the removal is included in your quote, you are responsible for removing the existing floor before wood restoration. Here are some tips for removing certain types of flooring:
Carpets. Remove tack strips, nails, and staples with appropriate tools like heavy-duty utility knives, pliers, and pry bars.
Linoleum. Soften the adhesive with a heat gun before removing it with a putty knife or some other appropriate tool. Remove any paper backing that may have been stuck to the wooden floor.
Laminate. Use warm water to soften the glue, then use a pry bar to remove the tiles one by one.
If you don’t have the skills or proper tools to remove the flooring yourself, ask the floor restoration company to include floor removal in your quote. Alternatively, you can hire another contractor to do it for you.
Warn your neighbors
The process of sanding can be noisy. Even if you are getting your floor restored during reasonable hours, it’s always a good idea to give your neighbors a heads up. This is especially important if they have young children who take naps during the day or pets that easily get agitated by noise.
Prepare your pets
Pets must be kept away from the work area at all times, especially after adhesives or coatings have been applied to your floor. Keep them in their kennel or tie them up until the service people say it’s safe to let your pets out. But if your pets get easily agitated by noise or strangers, it might be better to keep them out of the house entirely. Take them to pet daycare or ask someone to watch over them for a day to avoid getting them stressed.
If you have birds or fish, keep them in a well-ventilated room that can be closed to prevent fumes from coming in.
Fill gaps
Gap filling enhances wooden floors’ heat insulation and helps prevent water from seeping through the planks. You should get this done before having your floor restored to make for better results and avoid damaging the floor in the future. If large gaps in the floor aren’t filled, they can be susceptible to warping and dirt accumulation—not to mention that they are aesthetically unpleasant, too.
Prepare your home well in advance so that you won’t have to stress about anything on the day that the professional restorers come. Apart from these preparations, don’t forget to plan your family’s day. Since you won’t have access to certain parts of your home, consider having your kids and pets stay somewhere else until the job is completed.