Preventing scratches and dents on your bamboo floors
When it comes to designing or redoing your home, bamboo flooring offers a variety benefits over traditional hardwood and other materials. It’s more environmentally friendly, stands up to heavy use more effectively and is more easily adaptable to different styles and designs.
However, once you choose to go with bamboo for your floors, you still face the same challenges of preventing scratches and dings that can mar your pristine indoor surfaces. Fortunately, there are a number of steps you can take to avoid such damage, and most of them are relatively simple.
Clean the outside of your home
While your target is keeping the inside of your home clean, the way you handle your outdoor areas can have a major impact on what happens inside. Sweeping debris and dust away from high-traffic areas outside, like porches, entryways and garages, can give you a head start on keeping unwanted material from entering your home.
Utilize your floor plan
By changing up your floor plan on a semi-regular basis you can move the high-traffic areas of your rooms around so that certain spots don’t experience excessive wear and tear. You can also use rugs to protect the most vulnerable areas, while also giving yourself another design element.
While you’re at it, you will probably want to protect your floors from furniture by avoiding items with plastic wheels, using fabric pads on the feet of couches and chairs, or even turning to DIY options like old T-shirts or socks.
Beware of feet
Both your feet and those of your pets can be the biggest threat to your floors. By taking off your shoes upon entering your home, regularly trimming the claws of your pets and being especially cautious when changing weather conditions increase the chances of mud, dirt, snow and other natural elements making their way into your home you can better prevent damage to your bamboo floors.
Staining your floors
Adding an extra layer of protection to your floors through staining or top coating can also prevent scratches, but they may also decrease the floor’s visual appeal. Stained bamboo floors tend to give you the best of both worlds, as they offer better protection while remaining aesthetically pleasing.