No matter how hard you try stuff will happen. One of my kids tiny glass diamonds (not even really sure where it came from) somehow managed to get underneath one of the felt pads on the legs of our couch. I discovered it recently when someone moved the couch and left a three foot fairly deep scratch across the floor. That paled in comparison to what was actually going on under the couch leg.
I'm pretty good at matching/refinishing, and i'm going to tell you, our floor has a bit of built in stylistic distressing, but the filler+ careful matching/etc I did in that area is never going to match the rest of the floor sufficiently that if you look at it you won't see the scratch. Replacing 5-6 boards in the middle of the floor is really the only choice to make it look like new, but that would use up a good number of the spare pieces I have.
I guess at this point its "character", but in another decade or two the 2->3 major scratch issues a year + likely the high traffic areas will start to add up, and the floors will look like many of the houses I've seen with older wood floors. Worn out.
Sand the floors every 5-10 years should help. The worst dents and scratches might not sand out but that’s inevitable. It won’t look like new after 10 years but that’s probably acceptable.
Have you done this? Where I live its cheaper to rip it out and replace it with new wood flooring. Plus, the factory finishes are considerably harder and more scratch resistant than what you can get put down in place. I've actually wondered if a better plan for wood flooring is to treat it like my deck, a simple yearly oil based coating vs a hard finish.
Of course the out gassing from something like that is probably a health hazard.
Instead, I treat it more like carpet, aka I figure every decade or two it needs to be replaced. In my rentals I've been using an engineered laminate which is extremely robust. I picked it because I got a whole bunch of samples, took them home and then took a screw driver and started scratching the heck out of them until I found one that I couldn't scratch. I think its far superior and looks nearly as good as the real wood in the house I live in. I install it floating, but pull up the baseboards and replace them at the same time so it looks original. It has a bit of a hollow noise if you knock on it (despite being 3/4"), but I don't think there is a way to avoid that without glueing it down, which just adds cost when it needs to be replaced.
> I've actually wondered if a better plan for wood flooring is to treat it like my deck, a simple yearly oil based coating vs a hard finish.
We just put in a wood floor and went with Tung oil [1] as the finish. I don't know how well it'll hold up, but what sold me on the idea is that you can just re-apply the oil as needed.
We have three young kids, so who knows how well it'll hold up. I guess we'll find out.
Yes. What do you pay for the flooring vs the work? I pay $100+ per square meter for the floor (aroud $10 per sq foot) and sanding is 1/10th to 1/5 that ($10 to $20 per square meter or $1-2 per sq foot) with the costlier ones having a better finish that more resembles the factory one.
It depends... IIRC, It seems i'm probably paying a lot less than you are for the flooring/install. OTOH, the two times I've gotten quotes to sand and finish a floor its been more than just ripping out and putting in something else.
I guess it would be pretty inexpensive to rent a sander and do it myself (or hire unskilled labor) but i'm not sure I trust the latter, and the former sounds like the kind of frustration I don't need more of. I've tangentially helped people sand their decks and its was a PITA.
In Austin, there are a lot of people who can install wood flooring, and they are crazy fast, and it turns out that makes them pretty inexpensive. That is part of the reason I do floating floors in the rentals. The removal costs for a glued down floor, or "well installed" linoleum, is many multiples what it costs to put the new flooring in.
I'm pretty good at matching/refinishing, and i'm going to tell you, our floor has a bit of built in stylistic distressing, but the filler+ careful matching/etc I did in that area is never going to match the rest of the floor sufficiently that if you look at it you won't see the scratch. Replacing 5-6 boards in the middle of the floor is really the only choice to make it look like new, but that would use up a good number of the spare pieces I have.
I guess at this point its "character", but in another decade or two the 2->3 major scratch issues a year + likely the high traffic areas will start to add up, and the floors will look like many of the houses I've seen with older wood floors. Worn out.