Product Review - Basic Coatings Emulsion Finish

For the typical homeowner, this review could bore you to tears. I'll try to stay on the surface and keep the content relevant to what matters to you. Basic Coatings, a manufacturer of wood floor finishes has a product called Emulsion, which I have wanted to try out for a while. They advertise Emulsion as a water-based polyurethane finish that has the "the warm, rich, amber tones of an oil-based finish." Their claim is in fact THE ANSWER (assuming it works!) to the one major complaint both contractors and homeowners alike still have against current water based finishes.

Water based finishes, as you may know, are designed to outperform oil-based products. They also dry very quickly: 2-3 hours, versus 8-12 hours for oil-based. VOC levels in water-based products are considerably lower, better for the environment and better for our respritory systems as well. Finally, water-based finishes don't turn orange after several years the way oil finishes do. So, if someone could please just manufacture a quality water based finish that had some color to it...enter Basic Coatings and their product Emulsion.

I used it first on my own floors that were originally finished with clear water-based finish. My complaint about my own floors is the same one we hear out in the field all the time..."I love the upsides to water-based finish, I just don't like the color (or lack of)." Instead of sanding my floors, i just coated them, hoping that using the Emulsion finish on top of previous clear coats would still add some color.

On a scale of 1-10, I give Emulsion a 7+. It is very easy to use and did give the floor a warm, rich look that it didn't previously have. Outside of resanding or using toxic oil finishes, I didn't believe it until I tried it, and like I said I was very happy with results.

I wish I had some before pictures so you could see the difference. I can tell you that floors that are not colored/stained inititally, and then finished with traditional water-based finishes, will be very light in color to start and will fade over time; often giving them a near white-wash look after 5 years or so. In most homes, this is not a nice look.

The reason I rated the product a 7.5 instead of a 9 was that is was not easy to apply (compared to other high water-based products). It bubbled and foamed up too easily, and wasn't quite as thick as I would have liked. That said, I'm sure after I use it several more times I'll feel better about it and perhaps rate it higher.

To conclude, I really do like this finish. I like to use it when re-coating (not sanding) floors that are in good shape, but need a little rich color. Now that I'm sold, I am able to provide a much better selection of options to my clients...and this is good for everybody!

Thanks for reading and hopefully this was helpful...

Matt Landauer - The Floor Guy

www.proworksflooring.com

Review of New Bona Mop

While I like most Bona products, this new mop is silly! It is big and bulky and is built like a cheap volkswagen. The first one I bought broke while I was trying to put it together. I took it back, got another one, and luckily didn't break the new one...right away.

http://www.mybonahome.com/mop/MopPromotion.aspx

After I set it up, I realized I needed a class C liscense to operate it. I proceeded to smash it into many pieces. Several manufacturers have similar products and they are all just as silly. Keep the simple mop you have, or buy one that looks like this:

BonaKemi makes a great cleaning product that you buy at Costco, Ace Hardware, Safeway and many online shops. Buy the big gallon jug and keep some in a spray bottle.

http://www.mybonahome.com/Home.aspx

How To Care For Hardwood Floors

Caring for your hardwood floors is piece of cake when you know what to use (and what not to use) and how to do it. Long gone are the days of slaving away on hands and knees, scrubbing or waxing the hardwoods. It is important however to understand the right way to take care of your floor, because mistakes can be costly.


For starters, lets assume that your floors have been recently refinished and they look great.


HOW OFTEN SHOULD I CLEAN THE FLOORS?


This one is simple...as often as you like. There is no pressing need to clean them more than once a week, unless you have a busy home with lots of traffic. What you want to avoid is dirt/particles that will abrade the floors finish under foot traffic.


WHAT SHOULD I USE TO CLEAN THE FLOORS? ARE THERE DIFFERENT LEVELS OF CLEANING THAT I SHOULD DO?


Most of the time, it is sufficient to simply dry mop the floor to keep them particulate free. My favorite type of mop is called a Microfiber mob, that has some type of electrostatic charge that attracts dust, pet hair, etc. Here is a picture:























Should you have scuffs/spills etc. that require wet cleaning, you can simply wipe those spots with a water damped towel (add a little dish soap to warm water for a better cleaner) and then continue to dry mop the floor.


Every other week it makes sense to wet mop the entire floor, but make sure to follow these important rules for wet mopping:


1) No wax or oils - waxes and oils (M*rphy's Oil So*p) leave a film/residue/build on your floors that becomes unsightly after several applications. Moreover, the residue makes it very difficult and often impossible to re-coat the floors in the future - We will talk more about re-coating floors a little later.

2) Don't clean with vinegar...I don't care what your mom says! Vinegar mixed with water is a proven cleaner that really works. It works so well that it eats right through polyurethane. Cleaning with Vinegar and Water is not necessary and too abrasive.

3) Products that advertise that they will bring back that illustrious "shine" to your floors DON'T WORK and will screw up your floors! I'm not kidding here, and there are thousands of products on the shelves everywhere that people are putting on there floors to try and bring back the shine. If the shine is gone, call a flooring pro! http://www.proworksflooring.com/ We can clean, screen and re-coat your floors for less money than most people spend on cleaning carpets.

4) When I say wet mop, that doesn't mean an old school mop and bucket. DO NOT allow standing water on the floor. Remember when you where a teenager working at Taco Bell (guess where I worked as a teenager) and it was your turn to clean the lobby after the store closed? That type of mopping is not what you want to do to your floors at home. When I say wet mop, I mean a damp mop, and again, not the old-school type. My favorite mop to wet clean floors looks like this:










This mop has a terry cloth cleaning head with elastic that is easy to remove and rinse during cleaning.









HOW LONG WILL MY FLOORS LAST BEFORE THEY NEED TO BE REFINISHED?


The answer here will totally shock most of you...if you follow the simple cleaning instructions above, and have your floors re-coated every 1-3 years, you may NEVER need to refinish your floors.


Now, if you would like to change the color of your floors, you will have to have them sanded, but assuming you like the color they are now, we can help you keep them looking great indefinitely.


If you never have the floors re-coated, they should last 2-10 years, depending on traffic. I know this is a wide range, but traffic really does vary a ton from house to house. If you live in a house where every square inch of the wood is covered with soft-backed areas rugs, you have no kids/pets and you never wear shoes in the home, theoretically these floors will last forever. In my house - 5 kids, 3 cats and Dad is The Flooring Guy, so he can fix them, which means I can ride my bike and Rollerblades through the house at will - every 12 months they need to re-coated.

PLEASE TELL ME WHAT THIS RE-COAT THING IS...I'M CLUELESS


May I start by saying it is virtually painless, if you hire the right company to do it. In almost every home we work in, this procedure takes less than a day. We take care of all the furniture. You are back on the floors 2-3 hours after we are done. No sanding, no mess. If done at the right intervals, they will look like they did the last time they were refinished.


Basically, what we are doing is scuffing the finish and applying a new top coat of water-based polyurethane. This will address most, if not all of the scratches in the existing finish (provided you haven't dropped an anvil on the floor, and you are having this service done at regular intervals).


And the best part is that this service typically costs about a third of what a full refinish costs. In most US markets, this service costs $1.00 to $1.50 a square foot. So, for less money than what the average household spends on carpet cleaning each year, you can keep your hardwood floors looking great by having them CLEANED, SCREENED AND RE-COATED every 1-3 years by a local hardwood flooring professional. In and around Denver, your choice is simple:

The Truth About Prefinished Flooring

Is pre-finished flooring better than the old-fashioned raw wood, finished on-site?

This all depends on what is important to you. In most cases (over 90% of the time) when a consumer is given ALL the information (without bias) they almost unanimously choose the look and feel of the custom install, sand and finish project. The problem is that consumers don’t even get to see the difference when they shop for flooring at any of the retailers in town.

Flooring retailers are only selling pre-finished flooring products. You don’t stand a chance of being able to make an educated decision if this is your only means of shopping. They will tell you horror stories of the mess and toxic fumes created when doing a site sanding and finish. The reality, especially today, is not at all as they describe it.

Flooring companies using “dust containment” sanding equipment and high-end water-based finishes have revolutionized the industry in that these projects are Not Messy and You Don’t Have to Leave Your Home.

When given all options, the reason most consumers choose site-finished wood floors is the look and feel. A floor that is installed, sanded and finished on site will become one floor, artistically crafted and created for the most custom look possible.






This picture is a site sanded and finished floor.







A prefinished floor will essentially become a floor consisting of several hundred pieces of individual flooring.

If you look closely - better yet, click on this picture - you can see what we are talking about.

The price you will pay for either floor (assuming you are comparing similar flooring) will be nearly identical. The money you save in labor on a prefinished project will be spent on more expensive materials.

Finally, while it is true that the factory applied finish on prefinished flooring is more durable than the products we use to site finish a floor, the recommended maintenance for both floors is the same. Every 2-5 years (depending on traffic) wood floors should be lightly abraded and recoated with polyurethane.

My Prefinished floor is guaranteed for 25 years, isn’t that a great deal?

Sure it is, so long as you never intend to set foot on it. Seriously though, the warranty on a prefinished floor is a warranty that the finish won’t wear off for a certain time period under “normal” conditions. Normal is then defined on three pages of small print.

The fact is, ALL floor finishes will scratch under normal conditions and this is NOT covered under any warranty. The way to fix finish scratches is to have your floors periodically cleaned, screened (light abrasion) and recoated by a professional flooring contractor.

Prefinished flooring cannot be refinished, right?

This is not true. In fact much of refinishing work we do is sanding prefinished floors. We do have to sand just a tad harder on our first pass to remove the beveled edge, but when we are done, you will never know that the floors were ever prefinished.

What about engineered flooring? Is it Good, Bad, or Ugly?

Hardwood floor installation is an easy do-it-yourself project…right?

Today’s retailers would like you to think it’s easy. Many of them even offer free, one-hour “do-it-yourself” classes. The truth is, installing wood floors is not easy. To do it right, and well, takes a professional with plenty of experience. So why would retailers prefer you didn't know this?

To put it simply, companies like Home Depot and MacDonald Hardwoods, are in the D-I-Y business; they make money when folks decide to save money by doing it themselves. And then they make more money when you give up and decide you can't do it yourself. Between the jacked-up retail prices of the actual flooring material, all the tools and materials you'll need (and some you don't need!), and playing middle-man between you and an installer, they've got a vested interest in “helping” you do it yourself.

The first big profit center for a retailer is in selling you prefinished flooring (everything you ever needed to know about prefinished flooring ). With stronger, smoother, blemish-free finish already on the wood, they've solved the problems related to sanding and taken off your plate the most skill-intensive part of the project- the sand and finish work. The prefinished wood will cost about $1.50/ft more than raw wood, which is a little more than half the cost of sanding and finishing on site (labor and materials). Seems like a good deal so far, right? But here's the thing- that extra hard finish that's applied in a factory under sterile conditions and with aluminum-oxide in it to make it bulletproof...well, its not really bulletproof. In fact, although its hardness measures higher in lab tests, it will not withstand the normal scratch culprits (small rocks in shoe treads, dog nails, furniture feet) any better than site-finished floors. On top of this, the special factory finish has absolutely no ability to reduce dings and nicks which happen as a result of impact. A quick look at the lengthy fine print of the warranty that comes with prefinished flooring will reveal that it is no more durable, in practice, than traditional site-finished hardwood floors. Finally, and most important, there's the fact that installing prefinished floors means you'll have micro-bevels at the edge of each strip of flooring creating a slatted surface that gathers dust and dirt in its grooves and looks a little bit like a boat deck. At the end of the day, prefinished floors are almost never what people really wanted when they decided on hardwood floors.

The second way Home Depot wins when you get ready to do-it-yourself is by selling all of the tools and extra materials you'll need over the course of the project. At some point you'll decide you need some knee pads. They've got a cool looking pair on aisle ten. Want to see how your saw cuts with a shiny new blade? There's one right by the checkout. You get the picture.

Lots of guys tell a variation on the same story: how they started with a rush of enthusiasm and made great progress the first day. Then when some of the trickier parts of the installation come up, they soldier on- maybe a little too fast, and regret not getting that one cut a little further under the door jamb. Sheepishly, they admit that somewhere along the course of the project, Home Depot became less of a "supplier" in the construction sense, and more of a garage, where they return each morning to outfit themselves with tools and materials for the day's work. Let's face it- most of us enjoy shopping, and those who don't do it anyway. The DIY retailers know this and they make money selling us stuff we think we need.

But here's the biggest reason the retailer wants you to do it yourself: you're likely to give up. For every ten do-it-yourself projects, two are completed by the DIY-er (and still with dubious results). Three are aborted part of the way through; totally abandoned until a later rush of momentum scraps what was started and starts over with new material and a new plan. And on five out of ten projects, the person who started optimistically, armed with an education and a nailer from MacDonald's Hardwoods, realizes he's in over his head. There are just too many details that need to go right to make this project successful.

Sub-floor preparation and floor leveling

Understanding moisture barriers and what type to use over different sub-floors

Cutting back door jambs to allow flooring to fit snuggly underneath

Where and how to begin the installation

What to do when it is time to reverse the direction of the install

Working through hallways, around doors, and into closets

Transitioning to different types of flooring…professionally

Securing the last 3 or 4 rows when the nailer doesn’t fit between the flooring and the wall

Cutting a “rip” for the last row without cutting off your hand

So, when you decide all these things will take you too long to learn and too many tools to fit on your credit card, guess who has installers to help you? That's right! And financing to make it possible too! Home Depot, MacDonald Hardwoods, Loew's, they all will supply subcontractors to do your project. Because of the additional middle-man, you'll pay 35-50% more for the service, but don't expect for the service to be better than normal. Flooring subs hate the Home Depot jobs because there's always something the estimator forgot. One that comes up a lot is moving an appliance like a refrigerator or a pedastal sink- it must be done if the flooring is to be installed professionally, but the flooring guy is not authorized to touch what is not on his work order (especially not plumbing). This makes for projects with low morale that drag on and on. Often the homeowner settles for subpar workmanship just to get the grumpy installer out of his house for good, but make no mistake, Home Depot will get their check in the end.

So why hide the fact that a reasonably solid flooring installation (one that adds value to the home) is a little too much for the ordinary homeowner? Because there's too much money in selling the wood, then selling the tools, then selling the guys. Don't be fooled- find those guys yourself (how to find and hire the perfect contractor ), and let them estimate their own work, so they'll be accountable for the whole project. It won't be hard to tell from your first conversation with them whether they know enough to get you to the finish line quickly.