Kim Penning’s 39-year-old Barrington home contains two active children, an even more active Jack Russell terrier and four downstairs rooms with glossy hardwood floors.
“Little boys are trooping through here all day long,” Penning says. “If hardwood floors can stay nice in my house, they’ll work anywhere.”
Builder Bruce Blietz, president of the Blietz Organization, Inc., Evanston, reports that when he began building homes 30 years ago, buyers shied away from installing hardwood floors in high traffic areas like kitchens.
“Now everyone considers wood as an alternative to ceramic or vinyl,” he says.
Hardwood owes its new popularity to plastic–a variety of synthetic polyurethanes and natural and man-made resin coatings that, when applied to the surface of newly sanded wood, can keep floors shiny for years.
According to the National Wood Flooring Association (NWFA) in Manchester, Mo., homeowners can choose from three different types of manufactured coatings that make hardwood floors so durable they can be used in places wood has rarely gone before, such as kitchens, baths and utility rooms.
These finishes are not meant only for new floors. When Penning discovered how well a coating called Swedish Finish protected her family room floor, she had contractors rip up the carpeting in her living and dining rooms and restore the hardwood there as well.
Shiny wood floors, however, do have a downside. Incorrect installation can wreak havoc. The fumes caused by some finishes are so toxic that families must move out while they’re being applied. And the wrong kind of finish can cause a floor to crack.
In addition, refinishing old floors with new finishes can get expensive.
The Penning family learned how important good workmanship is the hard way. When their family room floor was water-damaged five years ago, they called in a disaster recovery outfit, whose workers sanded down the floor, spread on a polyurethane coating, and opened all the windows to air out the fumes.
Of course, says Penning, the dust from the sanding immediately blew onto the coating material and stuck there “like flour on honey.”
Dan Heney, technical director of the Maple Flooring Manufacturing Association, in Northbrook, says that homeowners can avoid such mishaps by hiring only wood contractors who are members of the National Wood Flooring Association (NWFA). Twice a year, Heney says, NWFA holds an Installation School in Memphis, where installers from all over the country can learn the proper techniques of sanding and applying protective finishes.
After her compounded disaster, Penning called on the nearby Carpet Max Flooring Outlet in Wauconda for more professional help. “The finish they put on years ago still looks like new,” she says.
Brian Flynn, who, with his partner, Rich Litowchak, has installed and refinished floors for that Wauconda Flooring Outlet for many years, says that homeowners can also avoid problems by choosing the right time of year to get their floors refinished.
Because all protective coverings require two or more coats, it’s best not to apply them during the humid days of summer, when each coat takes too long to dry, or during the winter, when it’s too cold to open the windows to let the fumes out.
Even in the best weather, no type of coating material is perfect and homeowners should be aware of the pros and cons of each before making a decision. Although prices for sanding and applying the finishing coats can vary, Christine Schrop, co-owner of Ozark Flooring Inc., in Park Ridge, says her company’s pricing, which is listed below, is about average for the Chicago area.
Oil-based urethane costs about $1.65 a square foot to apply and, according to Flynn, is the most susceptible to atmospheric moisture. Since this durable finish requires three or four coats, applying it can take days of drying time during humid weather. Once dry, this coating should last about five years. The main advantage over the more expensive Swedish coatings is that urethane has less of an odor.
Water-based sealers and finishes cost about $1.85 per square foot and, although they, too, require three coats, they dry faster than urethanes. Unlike the other finishes, which have an amber color, water-based coatings are clear and show off natural wood colors best.
The main disadvantage to water-based finishes, says Heney, is a process called “panelization,” which occurs when these sealants are applied improperly and the individual strips of flooring can bond together. All wood flooring expands and contracts during changes in the weather, Heney says, but when bonded flooring expands, it can produce cracks. Water-based finishers should last five to seven years.
At $2.25 a square foot, Swedish sealers are the most expensive, last the longest–up to 10 years–and are the most durable. They are, however, so toxic that installers must wear respirators while applying them and homeowners must stay elsewhere until the fumes clear away.
Ron Looze, a salesman for Carpet Max in Wauconda, says his company stopped using a popular Swedish coating, Bacca-Glitsa, because the product contained so much toxic formaldehyde.
Instead, Looze recommends Synteko, a Swedish sealant that dries so quickly that homeowners (and their pets and fish) can leave in the morning and return home that night to shiny floors.
Schrop says a home with normal usage needs only two coats of Swedish finish, although she recommends that families with small children request three coats.
But even a hardwood floor with the most durable finish can be damaged by poor care.
The National Wood Flooring Association recommends that homeowners wait at least a month before placing area rugs on their newly finished floors and then only use rugs with a backing that allows the floor to breathe. To prevent cracks, homeowners should use humidifiers to maintain a relative humidity of 45 to 50 percent. And, most important of all, homeowners should never use water to clean a hardwood floor.
The NWFA recommends dry mopping with an untreated dustmop or vacuuming once a week. Builder Bruce Blietz, who has a urethane-finished hardwood floor in the kitchen and great room of his own home, warns about one more threat.
“Women have gone back to wearing those stiletto heels, which put a tremendous amount of pressure on a tiny area,” he says.
For more information on hardwood floor finishes, contact the National Wood Flooring Association, and ask for its free booklet, “A Lifetime of Beauty”; 800-422-4556; 16388 Westwoods Business Park, Ellisville, Mo. 63011.
