Marlton NJ worn oak hardwood floor restoration

This hardwood floor refinishing project in Marlton, NJ underwent a huge transformation. This floor is an excellent example if you have well-worn patches, all the way through the finish in your wood floors, and want to see what they could look like after sanding and refinishing.

There was a lot of wear and tear from years of dogs playing on it, scratching and scuffing it up—damage from kids running in and out of the pool, with chlorinated water dripping everywhere. And the typical rolling office chair wear circle from years of rolling around at the desk without any floor protection.

Project details...

Originally a prefinished oak floor, it was installed throughout the living room, kitchen, dining room, hallway, and office. You can see the bevels on the floor in the before photos. Unfortunately, these bevels were full of dirt as well. In the image below, you can see how extensive the wear was. Pretty much every part, bar the floor protected under the area rug, was severely worn…

And below are some close-ups of the worst areas. Of course, the kitchen and flooring in front of the sliding door had the most wear, as would be expected…

The dark coloring is because the finish was gone, and dirt and grime were ground into the raw wood. Unfortunately, once the floor gets to this stage, no amount of cleaning can remove the damage. If you have similar areas in your home, your floors will need to be restored.

Here's a close-up of the damage done by the office chair…

And below are some shots of the hallway and dining room before we brought in our sanding equipment to start the restoration process…

After three different sanding passes, with various grits of sandpaper, this is the result…

We sanded all the gray and dirty black areas throughout the rooms and the bevels in the original flooring. Now we had a flat, clean, bevel-free surface, ready for staining and refinishing.

The customer chose Duraseal Provincial for the stain. They didn't want a super dark stained floor, or one too light, or with red shades. So this was the perfect color.

After the floor was stained and dry, we applied a commercial-grade two-component finish system—a massive upgrade over the factory finish originally applied to the floor. The finish we used was Street Shoe by Basic Coatings, which is part of our Silver Finish System. We went with a low sheen to give the floors a modern look. It also has the benefit of better hiding scratches from the customers' large dogs.

Above is the after results in the kitchen and dining room. What a massive transformation! The customer could hardly believe they were the same wood floors.

And here is the after photo of the dreaded rolling office chair area. No one will ever know what had been there previously. The owner now has a protective clear matt under his chair to prevent it from getting worn out again.

We enjoy transformations like this Marlton, NJ, hardwood floor refinishing project. If looked after, this floor will never get to the stage it was when we showed up to restore them.