Question from Jane
Could you advise me about finishes for wood floors? Our home has hardwood flooring throughout, so we’re having old wall-to-wall carpeting removed. Trouble is, our workman, who is reliable, skilled and good-natured, has told me we’ll need to “apply three coats of polyurethane finish” after the wood is sanded and smoothed. The maple color of the wood is fine and the floors do not need any staining.
I’ve said that with three coats of polyurethane I won’t have a wood floor, I’ll have a plastic floor! And of course, I’m also concerned about offgassing. About that I was told, “This product dries fast, probably in less than four hours, so there won’t be any smell.”
But it isn’t the smell I’m concerned about; it’s the continued offgassing even after the product has dried.
As a side issue, I’m also thinking that if a floor is covered with three coats of a plastic product, that floor will be dangerously slippery! As to that, I’m advised to use a carpet runner with a section of carpet underlay to prevent slipping.
This all sounds like preventable trouble to me! Are there safe wood finishing products available? We could use good old-fashioned Butchers’ Wax, but our workman says, “You’d have to reapply that every three months.”
Maybe it would be better to buff up the floor with wax rather than coating it with plastic!
Debra’s Answer
It would take pages for me to write everything to know about wood finishes, so I am going to respond to your comments and give you some tips.
First, if you want to use wax and reapply every three months, go for it.
It’s my opinion that you need to have some kind of protection on a wood floor. Without a finish, dirt gets dug in, and you can’t wash the wood because it is very porous. Any wood floor you have would need to have some kind of finish.
Now there are options for finishes that range from polyurethane to natural oils.
There are low-VOC polyurethane products that will evaporate out fairly quickly, within a few hours, and once they are dry, they will not outgas over time. At the moment I’m sitting at an oak desk my husband sanded and finished with Flecto Diamond Finish, which you can get at Home Depot or Lowe’s. Completely inert. I sit here all day every day with no odor at all. If I put my water glass on it and condensation gets on the finish, I wipe it right up.
I have another desk in this room that I finished with an all-natural plant-based finish. It looks beautiful, but it had a strong natural odor of the oils and resins and took about a year to dry. And it still spots if I get water on it.
