Our new house is at the age where a lot of the systems and original parts are nearing the end of their life expectancy. The roof, furnace, water heater, bathroom faucets, and hardwood floors are pretty much all showing signs of wear and tear and either need to be replaced or shown a little love. Some areas of the hardwood floors are worse than others, but since refinishing all of our hardwood floors is neither in the budget to hire out nor high on my list of projects I want to do myself right now, I’ve been searching for an easy, short-term fix. Then one day recently I was looking through my project supplies arsenal and stumbled onto a super easy way to fix scratched hardwood floors in about five minutes.
If you have scratched hardwood floors, let me introduce you to your new best friend.
What Howard Restor-a-Finish is NOT is a full house refinishing system. It is great for spot touch ups as a temporary fix. I’ve used it on small surface scratches throughout the house and the results have been pretty spectacular.
To really show you the difference I took photos in the study, where there are deep gouges in the floor in one corner. I mean, deep. Something very heavy and very sharp must have been dragged very roughly across the floor here. I can only speculate.
There’s nothing to remove scratches this deep other than thorough sanding and refinishing, but the improvement here is still really significant, takes about five minutes, and makes these deep scratches much less noticeable. For less intense floor scratches, the method I used practically makes them disappear.
First you puddle a bit of the Restor-a-Finish on the floor on top of the scratched area. You should choose a color close to the shade of your floors – I used Walnut.
Then use a paper towel to rub it into the floor, paying special attention to working it into the scratched areas.
Then use a dry paper towel to rub over the area several times. I passed over it three times with a clean towel each time.
The scratches are still visible, but SO much less so than before. And when you use the Restor-a-Finish on smaller scratched areas, the scratches practically vanish.
You can buy Howard Restor-a-Finish HERE. It’s definitely worth the five minutes – you’ll be amazed at the results for how little effort it takes!
