Looking after your floor
Most of what shortens a hardwood floor's life is a cleaning product, not wear. The right care depends on how the floor was finished, so start by picking yours.
Odie's Oil
A natural hardwax oil that soaks into the wood rather than sitting on top of it. This is what we put on most of our floors.
Care instructions Film finishPolyurethane
A clear coat that cures into a layer over the wood. Common on older floors and on jobs that call for one.
Care instructionsNot sure which you have?
If we did your floor, just ask — Travis will tell you from the job records, and odds are he already told you at length while he was doing it.
Otherwise, don't go by how the floor looks. Go by how it behaves.
- Find a scratch. On a film finish a scratch shows up as a whitish, cloudy line — that's the coating itself fractured. On an oil finish the scratch is in the wood, so it stays the same color as the boards around it. No white line.
- Run your hand across the grain. An oil finish leaves you touching wood: you can feel the grain, and the floor is warm under your hand. A film finish feels uniformly smooth everywhere, because what you're touching is a layer of plastic rather than the board.
- Look at a light reflected in it. A film finish gives you a sharp, mirror-like highlight. An oil finish scatters the light into a soft glow with no clear edge to it.
Ignore the water-drop test you'll find online. A cured Odie's floor sheds water about as well as polyurethane does — we've had a fresh coat take a chimney leak, bead the water on the surface, and wipe off without a mark — so beading tells you nothing about which finish you have.
A floor that's been down for decades may be neither, or may be a wax finish that's been coated over. If you're unsure, don't guess with a cleaner — send us a photo.