4 Simple Tests to Determine If You Should Refinish that Old Wooden Floor

If you are like a lot of people you may have purchased an older home that has some wooden flooring that has been covered for years by carpet. Or maybe your wooden flooring could use a major overhaul to make it look new again. There are three basic steps in refinishing a wooden floor and they consist of sanding, restaining and resealing. In order to determine if your wooden floor can handle the process, you need to assess its current condition.

If it is an older home you may not know what kind of wood it is or how many times it has been refinished in the past. It may be unknown if the wood will even be able to hold the finish needed to restore it properly. Before going through the process of working on your wood, there are some tests that you can perform in order to determine if the floor is worth saving.

Test 1- Helps you to determine if the floor will be able to handle another refinishing. How thick the wood is will be able to tell you how many times the wood has been sanded in the past. Each time the floor gets sanded, the wood becomes a little thinner and if it has been sanded too much there may not be enough left to sand again. If you know the wood is oak, then you probably wont have any problem in this department because oak floors are usually very thick and can withstand multiple sandings over the years. If it is any other type of wood, I would suggest going on with the test.

This first test is done by removing a small piece of the base board and measuring how deep it is from the top of the wood floor to the subfloor underneath. If there is already a cut out in the floor where a pipe or heating duct is, it may be even easier to do this measurement.

Test 2- Helps you to determine if the floor is softwood or hardwood. To perform this test, find a hidden space such as in a closet and press really hard on the floor with the edge of a coin or a spoon. If the floor gets dented by this, then you probably got a softwood floor. If you have a lot of traffic in the home or children it probably wouldn't be wise to spend the money and effort to finish a softwood floor because it will get dented and beat up quite easily.