Winter brings many things; holidays, loved ones visiting from out of town, happiness, beautiful snowy landscapes and peaceful moments, but it also bring with it the bitter cold. If you have hardwood floors this could also mean winter brings damage to your beautiful floors. Read on to find tips to make sure your floor stays in tip-top shape this winter.

Rubio Monocoat is quickly turning into the premier floor choice for our customers. Rubio Monocoat is a product from Belgium that is quickly turning into a hot new trend. If you want your floors to truly be extraordinary, this hardwood flooring system will give your floors and look and feel that traditional water based and oil based finished can't touch. We have so many customers ask us about this system, so we thought it would be a great opportunity to educate the public with a little write up. Read on if you'd like to find out the benefits of this system.

We like to take the time to go over some style trends that we pick up on from time to time. We see certain trends throughout our industry and we like to point them out for our customers so that they can make more informed decisions. We'd like to share some photos from our recent project that just came out terrific.

We find that choosing the right stain color is one of the most difficult decision that our customers make. There is usually a lot of deliberation that leads to second guessing. We try to help out customers make a decision that they are going to be happy with, but our advice can only go so far. We hope that we can offer some tips in order to make your future decision easier.

Hardwood floors are very much affected by current trends. This year is not exception as we've seen our customers gravitating towards certain styles. We'd like to tell you about them after the break, so go ahead and click through.

We'd like to remind our customers about how to deal with the recent humidity in the Midwest if you have hardwood floors in your home. Moisture in a home can completely ruin your floors over time. Read on if you'd like to know just what you should do in these humid Summer days.

We put together a quick list of how to take care of hardwood floors. We give customers a guide on how to maintain their hardwood floors whenever we install new floors or refinish older floors. We find that our customers love the guide we give them, so we'd like to put together a list here of what to do and what not to do.

Hardwood flooring is a very competitive industry. There are many business out there that are trying to get your business. Some hardwood floor companies are better than others. It's difficult for the consumer to know why one company is better than another. The only metric most consumers have to gauge one business over another is price. We'd like to at least present an argument for why asking for price per square foot may not be the best way to differentiate one company from another. 

If you've ever had new hardwood floors installed, you may have heard of acclimating your hardwood floors. This is an often overlooked process that it crucial when it comes to installing new hardwood floors. We won't get into the technicals too much, but we'd like to explain why this process is just so important. 

From time to time, we have a customer that works from home. A home office can often be the most important room in the house for this type of person. We were recently asked by a customer about what the best practices are when it comes to caring for a hardwood floor in a home office - specifically, caring for a floor that is going to have an office chair on it. We took some time to put together a write up for this customer and we thought that'd we share it with you.

We think hardwood floors are beautiful (naturally). We rebuilt our gallery from the ground up to make it easier to sort our photos into project pages. We hope this is going to make it easier for people to see our work over the past couple years. Read on to see some of our favorites from our new gallery.

Summer is definitely here in the Midwest. We know how humid it can be but we definitely know how sunny it can be as well. Everyone knows that they need to protect their skin from the sun's rays, but did you know that you should also protect your hardwood floors from the sun? The sun can do some serious damage to your hardwood floors. Discoloration is the largest culprit, but it doesn't stop there. We'd like the give you some tips so that you know what to do in order to protect your hardwood floors.

Styles come and go, and it's the same with hardwood floors. A particular color for a floor might be popular for a few years and then everyone gets sick of it and wants something different. That's been the case recently with floor colors. Customers really love darker hardwood floors. We love the way they look to. They can add elegance to any room. We recently began a project that involved resanding light ash floors and restaining them to a darker color. We'd like to share some of the results with you.

Summer is here and it's not a Chicago summer without some heat that comes from nowhere. To top it off, we have awful humidity that makes it hard to breathe. Humidity makes everything sticky, but it can also have some very serious repercussions on your hardwood floors. We want to give you some basic advice when it comes to hardwood flooring in the summer so you can avoid cupping in your hardwood floors. Moisture is a hardwood floor's worst nightmare, so it's important to understand how you can minimize the moisture inside of your home during these summer months in order to prolong the life of your beautiful hardwood floors.

We've taken the time over the past few weeks to put together a guide that explains how refinishing hardwood floors works. The guide was split into parts to make it easier to consume in one sitting, but we also want somewhere that all the pieces of the process can be found at once.

Well, we’re almost done! All that’s left is the fun, and enjoyable part of the process: vacuuming and applying finish. After your final buffing pass be sure to properly vacuum the entire floor. Do not leave any dust or debris behind. Next, it is highly recommended, all though not mandatory, to get a bona mop or something similar, attach a dry microfiber cloth or rag to the bottom, and tack the entire floor to clean up and remove any remaining dust left behind from vacuuming. This will produce the cleanest and smoothest finish and is a great habit to get into.

Well, this is it, we’re almost there! I’m sure you can see the finish line is close for this project, and I can too. If you’ve made it this far your floors should be looking really terrific. We have one more final step left to do, which is crucial; a final light buffing pass. We do this to blend all of the places that were edged, random orbited, and belt sanded together into one beautiful even sanding scratch pattern. This way no color differences or picture framing problems can occur. For this you will need your buffer, a driver plate, a thick white or red backing pad, and a 120 grit sanding screen. Attach it to the buffer and place the buffer on the floor as shown in the picture below.

We continue our ongoing series with some instructions pertaining to the orbital sander. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

This week, we continue our ongoing series. As always, if you have any questions about any of the information that you're reading here, we're more than happy to answer the questions that you have. We don't expect anyone to get this down 100% with their first try. Hardwood flooring is a delicate and nuanced process that takes years to master. That being said, we'd like to share some of that wisdom when it comes to sanding the edges of your floor.