Sanding and Finishing

Sand and Finish Services

If your wood floors have seen better days, we are here to help. One of the biggest benefits to installing wood floors in your home is that over the years - and design trends - you can sand them down to natural wood, fix any issues and start fresh, change color or just give them that "shine" back.

At Flesher Floors we are experts in sanding and finishing existing hardwood or engineered wood floors. We understand the process and don't skip a step. Your floors are a huge investment and we know how to take care of them so that they will last you a lifetime.

Sand & Finish of Solid Wood Flooring

Solid wood flooring is known to last a lifetime and with proper care and maintenance this is true. There are some homes that are more than 100 years old with the original hardwood floors! These floors can be sanded, stained and coated with fresh coats of finish to bring old, worn out floors back to life after years of wear and tear.

While solid wood floors may be more expensive to install initially, because of their ability to be re-sanded, they can cost less over the long term because you can change the color by refinishing them rather than completely replacing the flooring.

When it's time to sand and finish your existing wood floors, be sure to hire a hardwood flooring professional with decades of experience specifically with sanding and finishing floors. It's a very involved process with lots of steps to follow. If someone doesn't fully understand each step, it can spell disaster for your floors that were supposed to last a lifetime.

When sanding solid wood floors, we use several machines and grits of sand paper to get them ready to accept the stain. After set up, we use our Big Machine to make the first cut to remove the existing stain and finish. Once we do this, we use finer grits of sand paper with several passes to make the wood smooth. We have an edger that sands right up against the wall. We use the same process with this as we do the Big Machine and then we then blend the edges to what we sanded with the Big Machine.

We put stain samples directly on your floor so you can see it in your home. Plus, those swatches at the store are not nearly big enough to get a good idea of what it will look like. We offer custom stain mixes in case you haven't found what you are looking for.

Once it's time for stain, we water pop the floor to raise the grain to give a better look to the end product. After the stain has dried, we apply 3 coats of high quality water-based finish. This is the simplistic view of how we complete the process, but if a single step is skipped, you will see it at the end of the project with swirrel marks, gouges or uneven stain patter. It can turn into a mess very fast if someone doesn't have proper training.

Each hardwood flooring project takes a certain number of man hours and we absolutely will not skip a step in our process. We know you want the job done quickly so that you can get back to your routine and we want the same thing, however, we want you to have the most beautiful floors when we are done and we know what it takes to accomplish that.

Sand and Finish of Engineered Wood Flooring

Engineered wood floors are made up of a thin layer of wood applied to a plywood board. So, they are not a solid wood product but the top layer of each board is a layer of actual wood. When selling these floors, some flooring stores would have you believe they can be re-sanded SEVERAL times over their lifetime - similar to solid wood floors. This is definitely a stretch! While the ability to sand an engineered wood floor twice may be the case with some, it's definitely a rarity.

Typically, each engineered floor has one good sanding in it over the lifetime of this floor - depending on how thick the top layer of wood is. Since design trends change and the color tones that used to be popular may not be your taste anymore, it's worth having a flooring pro out to look at your engineered wood floor to examine their condition and the possibility of refinishing before you decide to tear them out and replace them with another product.

If you do decide to sand your engineered wood flooring, be sure you hire someone that has done it many times before and has decades of experience with wood flooring. The top layer of an engineered wood floor is called the "wear layer" and once you sand through this layer, the board is no good anymore and would need to be replaced. If someone comes in to sand your floors and doesn't know how to properly handle the sanding process, you could be looking at replacing all of your flooring.

The process of sanding and refinishing engineered wood floors is a delicate balance between sanding aggressively to remove the layers of stain and finish and carefully so as not to sand through the thin top layer of wood. Most engineered wood floors are originally installed as a pre-finished product so the finish is a bit tougher to sand off than one that was finished on site. In most cases, sanding and finishing engineered wood floors can definitely be accomplished and is much less expensive then replacing your floors with new wood, but in most cases you have one chance to get it right, so hire a wood flooring professional that understands this fully.

The sand and finish process is similar to refinishing solid wood floors by using the same machines and sand paper grits, but technique is slightly different. The amount of time it takes to finish the project is about the same as sanding a solid wood floor. Sometimes several boards may have worn more than others so it may be necessary to replace those. Once sanded, you won't be able to tell that they are new. As with solid wood floors, the process followed is key so that you end up with beautiful floors with an extended life until the next design color trend comes along.