How to make your old floors shine again

When it begins to show that the old floor cov­er­ings have seen bet­ter days, many home-own­ers con­sider a renov­a­tion. How­ever, through­out the entire renov­a­tion pro­cess, it is import­ant to choose exclus­ively products that fea­ture very low levels of harm­ful emis­sions – no mat­ter wheth­er you make use of primers, adhes­ives, oils or var­nishes. This is what the EMICODE^® label guar­an­tees: low­est pos­sible emis­sions and healthy indoor air.

They get trampled on, mal­treated by vacu­um clean­ers and bobby cars, objects of daily life fall­ing down and leav­ing dam­age: floors take a real beat­ing over the course of their life­time. Regard­less of the type of floor­ing – wheth­er wood, tile, vinyl, or oth­er mater­i­als – even­tu­ally it’s time for a refresh or renov­a­tion. It’s not always neces­sary to rip out the exist­ing floor­ing. With a tiled floor, for instance, it is often suf­fi­cient to simply replace those tiles that have cracks or chipped corners. Homeown­ers usu­ally have a few spare tiles from the cur­rent floor­ing stored in the base­ment or gar­age. After repla­cing the defect­ive tiles, the entire floor can be regrouted. Even if there are no dam­aged tiles, regrout­ing the floor can make a huge dif­fer­ence.

Oth­er types of floor­ing can also be ren­ov­ated at reas­on­able effort and expense. Con­crete, for example. After sand­ing, it can be covered with any type of floor­ing – wheth­er wood, ceram­ic, nat­ur­al stone, or oth­er mater­i­als. Altern­at­ively, the sanded con­crete sur­face can be fin­ished as exposed con­crete. In both cases, it is import­ant to note that con­crete has an open-pored sur­face after sand­ing, which must be treated by oil­ing, wax­ing or seal­ing after vacu­um­ing off the sand­ing dust.

Cement screeds can be ren­ov­ated in a sim­il­ar way. Any uneven­ness that may have been caused when remov­ing the old floor­ing can be repaired with a lev­el­ing com­pound. Once the screed has dried and, if neces­sary, been sanded, the floor is ready for the install­a­tion of a new cov­er­ing. In util­ity and cel­lar rooms, it is also pos­sible to simply seal the screed and use it without any cov­er­ing.

If old tex­tile floor­ing has been glued to the sub­floor, remov­al can be chal­len­ging. If a water-sol­uble adhes­ive was used, the car­pet­ing can be pulled off rel­at­ively eas­ily after moisten­ing it for approx. 1 to 2 hours. With a non-water-sol­uble adhes­ive, more effort is required. Once the old car­pet­ing has been removed, some adhes­ive residue may remain on the floor. This can be treated with hot air (hairdry­er) or soapy water so that after­wards it can be scraped off with a putty knife. If none of this works, spe­cial chem­ic­al agents must be employed. Finally, depend­ing on its con­di­tion, the sub­floor can be sanded and pre­pared for the new floor­ing.

Design or vinyl floor­ing can also be refin­ished. All you need to do is lightly roughen the sur­face, re-seal it, and then apply a spe­cial pro­tect­ive coat­ing. After that, the floor­ing will shine like new again.

Floors made of wooden floor­boards or par­quet can be refin­ished mul­tiple times, giv­ing them an extremely long ser­vice life (with prop­er care, sol­id wood par­quet can last 60 to 100 years) and mak­ing them par­tic­u­larly sus­tain­able. Over the years, wood floor­ing can be sanded down sev­er­al times and then newly oiled, waxed or sealed. This par­tic­u­lar sus­tain­ab­il­ity is only achieved if the par­quet floor is firmly glued to the sub­floor. It is not advis­able to carry out a float­ing install­a­tion of par­quet, which is often done by homeown­ers them­selves. The reas­ons: Glued-down par­quet is much more stable, can with­stand heav­ier loads, and can be sanded down more eas­ily.