Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Woodland Hills, CA

Hardwood flooring is one of the best investments you can make in your home. Hardwood flooring adds a classic presence to your home and can be fit into almost any home or interior design. The lifespan of a hardwood floor depends on many factors including, location, climate, exposure to moisture, wear and tear, and maintenance. It’s common for hardwood flooring to last for 20 years and longer, but a well built and well cared for floor can last many decades longer. In the United States and Europe, there are original hardwood floors dating back to the 19th century.

Refinishing Preserves Hardwood Flooring

When treated right, hardwood is an amazingly durable material. The finish used on the wood is not everlasting though. Periodic refinishing is necessary to maintain the beauty of the hardwood floor and to protect the wood. Most hardwood flooring in Los Angeles has an oil-based polyurethane finish. This is the longest lasting finish. Polyurethane can shift with wood panels without cracking immediately. Obviously, when wood panels shift too much, any hardwood finish will crack, but oil-based polyurethane has flexibility to reduce the chances of cracks and breaks. There are some homes in Los Angeles which use water-based finishes on their hardwood floors. These finishes are not as durable as oil-based finishes so they will require more frequent maintenance. A less common request is Swedish-finish. This is a classic alcohol varnish which originates in Sweden. It has a stronger odor but is very strong and easy to clean. At Glamour Flooring, we offer our customers some of the best hardwood floor refinishing Los Angeles & Woodland Hills have to offer. In this way, we ensure that our refinishing services will leave your floors looking brand new.

Why You Need To Refinish Your Hardwood Flooring

Nothing really stays the same for long, especially when it comes to hardwood floor. After 20 years, more or less, one can expect their hardwood floor to have all the imperfections it can possibly have – from discoloration to scratches to dullness and beyond. These only mean that your floor has aged and that it needs a good refinishing. If you have pets, children, frequent guests or very heavy traffic in your home, your floor may need to be refinished. The type of wood can also affect how often you may need to refinish. Certain kinds of wood like bamboo flooring can appear dirty or be more difficult to maintain a like-new appearance.

Refinishing vs. Replacement

Unless there is severe damage, there is often no need to strip up your hardwood for replacement. A typical hardwood floor can be coated about six times in its life span. In many cases, an expert will be able to bring your floor back to its original beauty. Refinishing hardwood flooring is not an easy job. It takes a lot of knowledge, specialized tools and expertise for optimal results. Hiring the right hardwood flooring specialist with knowledge and experience is essential to get the best result possible. As an authority in the field, Glamour Flooring offers some of the best hardwood floor refinishing Los Angeles. Glamour Flooring has developed a proven technique and approach to hardwood floor refinishing which has enabled us to salvage floors which clients often thought would need to be completely replaced. Sometimes replacement is your best long-term option, but our refinishing service has helped preserve floors for years in many cases.

Does The Kind of Hardwood Affect The Refinishing Process?

The refinishing process is similar for most woods. During refinishing a very small amount of wood is sanded off the top of the wooden floor panels. So whether you have Oak, Cherry, Maple, Mahogany, or some amazing exotic combination of woods, as long as the wood panels can be sanded without affecting the integrity or structure of the floor, we’ll be able to refinish and restore the floor. Each floor is unique. Although they may start out similarly, each floor is exposed to different levels of humidity, temperature changes, wear and tear, and structural issues. Contact Us to inspect your floor. This will allow us to assess its condition, determine if refinishing is the best option, and provide a price quote.

Can Engineered Hardwood Be Refinished?

This is the question we are asked most often in Los Angeles, and the answer is not the one most people expect. A large share of homes here sit on a concrete slab, which means the floor is almost certainly engineered hardwood rather than solid. Engineered floors can often be refinished — but how many times depends entirely on one number: the thickness of the real-wood wear layer on top.

• 2mm wear layer — usually one light sanding at most, and sometimes none at all
• 4mm wear layer — typically two to three refinishes across the floor’s life
• 6mm wear layer — comparable to solid hardwood for refinishing purposes

Sanding through a thin wear layer exposes the core and cannot be undone, so this is worth establishing before anyone brings a sander into your house. If you still have the original paperwork, the wear layer will be on the spec sheet. If not, we can usually tell by examining an exposed edge at a floor vent or a threshold.

Has Your Floor Already Been Sanded?

An older floor may have been refinished by a previous owner, which changes what is left to work with. Two quick checks you can do yourself before calling anyone:

• Look at a heating vent or a doorway threshold. Lift the vent cover and look at the cut edge of the board. You can see how much wood sits above the tongue — that is your remaining sanding depth.
• Look for exposed nail heads or a visible tongue. If either is showing at the board edges, the floor is at or near the end of what it can take.

If both checks look marginal, replacement may genuinely be the better value — and we would rather tell you that at the assessment than halfway through a sanding job.

Changing the Colour of Your Floor

Refinishing is the moment to change colour, and the direction matters. Going darker is straightforward. Going lighter is harder, because stain penetrates the wood and sanding back to bare timber costs you wear layer you may not be able to spare. Going from a dark walnut stain to a pale natural or white-oak look is possible on many floors but not on all of them.

Species affects the result too. Oak takes stain evenly and predictably. Maple and birch are denser and can blotch, so they often look better with a clear or very light finish than with a heavy stain. We test the stain on an inconspicuous area of your actual floor before committing — a stain sample on someone else’s board tells you very little.

What to Plan For

Refinishing is disruptive in a way installation is not, because it happens around your existing home rather than in an empty room. Plan for furniture to be moved out of the space entirely, for the floor to be unwalkable while coats cure, and for a noticeable odour with oil-based finishes. Water-based finishes cure faster and smell far less, but are generally less durable — which is the trade-off worth discussing before you choose.

Ask us for the specific timeline for your floor when we assess it, since the number of coats and the cure time vary by finish and by the weather that week.

Our Sanding and Refinishing Process

We refinish solid hardwood, engineered hardwood and parquet floors. Once we have confirmed the floor has enough wood left to sand, the job follows the same core steps:

• Prepare the area. Furniture is moved out and the room is protected. If old carpet, linoleum or vinyl is covering original hardwood, we take it up carefully so the wood underneath is not damaged.
• Sand the floor. A drum sander handles the open field of the floor, with edging and corner sanders used along walls and into corners so the surface is even right to the edges.
• Clean thoroughly. The floor is vacuumed and then wiped with a tack cloth to lift fine dust before any stain or finish goes down.
• Stain and finish. Stain is applied if you are changing colour, followed by the coats of protective finish.
• Let it cure. Allow the floor at least a day to dry before walking on it, and longer before furniture and rugs go back.

Hardwood Stair Refinishing

Stairs are easy to overlook, but they take some of the heaviest wear in the house, and a freshly refinished floor can make worn treads look even more tired next to it. We refinish hardwood staircases as well as floors, so the stairs can be sanded and finished to match the rest of the room.

Frequently Asked Questions

Refinish or replace?

Unless there is severe damage, refinishing is often the better option. Where boards are too thin to sand again or water-damaged, or you want a wider plank or a new color, replacement makes sense.

Which finishes do you use?

Oil-based polyurethane (most common in LA homes and the longest-lasting), water-based finishes, and on request a Swedish finish.

Can you refinish stairs too?

Yes. See hardwood stair refinishing.

More from our hardwood showroom in Woodland Hills

• Hardwood flooring store in Woodland Hills – visit the showroom at 21030 Victory Blvd
• Solid vs. engineered hardwood flooring
• Wide plank European white oak – 7.5″ to 13″ planks
• Hardwood floor installation – slab glue-down and nail-down
• Hardwood stair treads, risers and nosing

Book a Free Refinishing Assessment

We will look at your floor, tell you whether it can be sanded again and how many times, and give you an honest comparison between refinishing and replacing. There is no charge and no obligation.

Call (818) 963-0878 or book an in-home assessment. Our showroom is at 21030 Victory Blvd, Woodland Hills, open Monday–Wednesday and Friday 10am–6pm, Thursday 10am–4pm and Saturday 10am–5pm, closed Sunday. We serve Woodland Hills, Tarzana, Encino, Calabasas, West Hills, Canoga Park, Sherman Oaks and the surrounding San Fernando Valley.

If the assessment shows replacement is the better call, you can browse our hardwood flooring range or read about European white oak.