How to properly care for parquet at home?

With all its advantages, an elite and stylish coating has one obvious drawback - caring for parquet boards often causes too much trouble. Violation of the rules for processing the material leads to its rapid wear; refusal to carry out the necessary manipulations is accompanied by a decrease in its decorative properties.

Experts say that a parquet floor will delight you with its cleanliness and attractiveness for a long time if you adhere to the basic rules for its maintenance. Before washing the parquet, it is necessary to determine its type, then the list of acceptable and recommended measures will be obvious.

Types of parquet and their specific maintenance requirements

All types of expensive coatings can be divided into two groups - raw materials coated with varnish and oil. Depending on the characteristics of the coating, parquet maintenance is carried out:

• Varnished. In this case, wet processing is highly not recommended. Such a floor needs to be swept and vacuumed regularly; only local contamination is treated with special means. Felt pads should be installed on furniture legs to prevent damage to the material. Caring for a varnished parquet board requires sanding it and renewing the coating at least once every five years. Failure to do this stage leads to a thinning of the protective layer and darkening of the wood.In especially advanced cases, even sanding does not help; the floor has to be completely renewed.
• Oil. Daily care of oiled parquet floors requires the use of a vacuum cleaner. In addition, regular wet cleaning is necessary, during which specialized ready-made and folk remedies are used. The protective layer should be renewed at least once every six months, but such frequent pre-grinding is not required.

Separately, you can highlight laminated parquet. At home, dry cleaning and profile sprays are used to clean and restore it. Contrary to popular belief, a steam cleaner is not suitable in this case.

How to properly wash parquet: features of regular and intensive cleaning of the material

To know how to properly care for parquet on a regular basis, you need to understand that the main enemy of the coating is not local stains of various nature, but the most common dust.

If a separate stain can be easily removed using a special preparation and this happens quite rarely, then fighting dust will take most of the time. Based on this, experts have identified the following rules for maintaining parquet covered with varnish, oil or laminate:

1. The vacuum cleaner should be used daily. In extreme cases, it can be replaced by using a barely damp, very soft cloth or sponge.
2. To remove persistent local contaminants, it is prohibited to use abrasives and aggressive cleaning agents. The use of solvents and dishwashing liquid is also completely excluded.
3. There is no such thing as regular general cleaning. Parquet flooring should be washed only when it becomes dirty.In this case, use soft rags, hair brushes, stain removers or parquet paste.
4. It is worth stocking up on restorative products in advance. They are a colored paste that can be used to restore scratched floors. The product is applied to the damaged area, the excess is immediately removed and left to dry. Serious damage will have to be sanded and re-varnished.

Tip: Caring for your parquet will become much easier if you place two rugs - a hard one and a soft one - right in front of the entrance to the house. The first will collect all the dirt from the shoes, the second will collect excess moisture.

We must not forget that caring for parquet also means creating optimal conditions in the room. This is a temperature within 19-22ºС, humidity around 60%, regular use of protective products. The main thing is that with all this, too much moisture does not get on the floor. Even during the washing process, it is recommended to apply water to the coating using a spray bottle.

The most effective and safest products that are recommended to be used for parquet care

When choosing parquet care products, you must take into account the quality of the coating and the type of contamination. At home, it is recommended to adhere to the following rules:

• From the oil layer, most stains can be easily washed off with water. Particularly persistent formations can be scrubbed off by adding laundry soap to the liquid. If the dirt cannot be removed, you will have to wash the parquet with a solvent-based cleaner. This must be a profile product; even gentle compositions for treating fabric can cause harm. After such treatment, it is necessary to restore the protective layer on the damaged area.We apply special oil to the fabric, gently rub it into the surface, first perpendicular to the fibers, then parallel and leave for 12 hours.
• Cleaning varnished parquet at home comes down to using a soap solution. As a last resort, profile polishes and cleaners for the varnish layer are used. It is best to use aerosols that are applied directly to the stain and immediately removed with a napkin. They will not only remove stubborn marks, but will also take care of the parquet board. If you don’t have a quality product at hand, you can get by with white spirit, the remnants of which must be removed with a damp cloth.
• Grease stains from laminated parquet are removed with a special paste or laundry soap. Clean water can handle everything else without any problems.

Only compliance with all the listed conditions guarantees the preservation of the functional and decorative properties of parquet for many years. You should not save on specialized products, trying to replace them with dubious analogues. Caring for the material may not be the cheapest, but the end result will be worth it.