Sanding and refinishing: What’s the Difference?

If you’ve recently purchased hardwood floors or engineered hardwood flooring, you have made a quality choice! Your flooring choice will beautify your home and serve your family well for many years. Taking care of these expensive investments is fairly easy; however, this is no reason to discount the importance of proper wood floor maintenance. Having your floor professionally sanded and refinished periodically helps it continue to look and perform at its best.

Sanding? Refinishing? While they’re both important parts of caring for your hardwood floor, they’re not one and the same, and they both serve distinct purposes. UB Hardwoods, a Plymouth, Minnesota floor retailer and floor installation service, discusses the differences between the two below.

Sanding: Like a Polishing Job for your Floors

When you hire a professional to sand your floors, you’re essentially hiring them to buff out the imperfections in your hardwood floor—no, not from poor installation or a defective product! These imperfections tend to crop up after the flooring is used for years and consists of scrapes, scuffs, and blemishes from standard wear-and-tear.

The sanding process, as you can imagine, creates quite a lot of dust! That said, UB Hardwoods practically eliminates the dust from sanding with our top-of-the-line dustless sanding techniques. Regardless of the sanding technique used, the end intention is often to open the floor up for resealing or staining.

It’s important to note that engineered hardwoods, due to their composition, can take only a couple of sanding sessions before its top layer wears out. It’s therefore imperative that you take care of this type of flooring by minimizing cuts and scrapes.

Refinishing: A Fuller Floor Restoration

Refinishing tends to be a much more extensive process than simple sanding—though sanding is nearly always a part of refinishing! Refinishing a hardwood floor often includes sanding off the topcoat, patching the floor where necessary, re-staining, and reapplying a clear top coat as a protectant.

It’s a much more time consuming and expensive process, but for floors that have been severely damaged, it might be the best solution. Applying a fresh, clear topcoat to your floors every three to five years can help reduce the need for such expensive maintenance.

Not Sure What you Need? UB Hardwoods Can Help

We can help you get your hardwood flooring looking like new again, regardless of what your budget allows for! No matter how damaged your floor is, our team is on the case. To see what our customizable services can do for you, give our Plymouth showroom a call today at 763-807-4500.