There’s a trend today for people to take care of their floors by adopting the Japanese custom of leaving their shoes at the door. It’s a nice idea if your family can live with it; it will certainly cut down on the sweeping/ vacuuming schedule. Of course, if you have pets who track in all kinds of debris, and you’re not compulsive about making your guests and your UPS delivery man remove their shoes, your floors will sooner or later suffer the same indignities as any shoe-wearing household.

When really bad things happen to floors—deep gouges, extensive water damage, I’m talking disaster here—you’ll have to opt for refinishing or replacement. But barring a crisis, there are lots of things you can do to maintain an old floor’s—or its covering’s—attractive appearance. Read on.

Water marks, burn marks, and scratches all affect the appearance of your hardwood floors. They’re like blemishes; some people don’t mind them, but others rush for a cover-up. If you choose the cover-up strategy, it’s best to deal with them as soon after they happen as possible. When you’re trying to fix a minor flaw, you’ll need to use a wax stripper to remove the protective finish from the damage site. Check with your hardware store associate about the appropriate stripping product for the finish on your floor. When you’re finished with the repair, you can rewax or oil the area.

I know everyone in your house is supposed to use a coaster under their drinks, but if Dad set a glass of water on the floor and forgot it, try this fix.

You’ll need the following:

Wipe clean, let dry, and rewax or reoil the area.

Grandpa’s lit cigar fell on the floor and left a mark in the finish. Now you’ve got a good excuse to make him take his habit outside! But you still need to repair the floor. You’ll need the following:

If a burn has just darkened the surface of the wood, you can sand it with fine sandpaper, and wipe up the sanding dust with the damp cloth. (Wear a dust mask when sanding to protect your lungs from particles.) Finish as desired; you may want to give the area a light coat with the putty or shellac stick before you reoil or rewax the spot. Use the sticks according to manufacturer’s directions.

For a deeper burn, follow these steps:

Rewax or reoil the spot.

You don’t have to be too compulsive about this; if you’ve got dogs and kids, you’ll be fixing scratches every other day. But before routine waxing or oiling of your floor, and after stripping the protective finish, you can spend a little time touching up the scratches with your handy putty stick or stick shellac, then rewax or reoil the area.

For a deeper gouge, you may get a better result by using wood putty from a can to fill the gouged spot. When it dries, you can feather the edges with fine sandpaper. If the patch is too visible, touch it up with the putty stick or stick shellac. Then rewax or reoil the spot.

If you dislike housecleaning as much as I do, you won’t like this advice. But it works. I’ve already discussed the no-shoes strategy. But if you can’t deal with that, the best defense for your floor’s finish is frequent sweeping or vacuuming. Surface dirt is the real culprit in floor wear.

Wobbly wood floors are annoying and dangerous: that thing that goes bump in the night could be you! Here are a few common problems, and how to solve them.

Before you drive a screw or nail into hardwood floors, you must first excavate one or more of what’s called a pilot hole with your electric drill. The drill hole acts like a “pilot” for your nail or screw, literally directing it toward a tight, clean insertion. Pilot holes are your insurance that you won’t chew up the flooring with a poorly hammered nail or a screwy screw . Many instructions in this book call for pilot holes. If you’re unfamiliar with using the drill, practice on a piece of wood that you clamp firmly to a work table (careful, don’t drill the table). Wear safety goggles when you drill. Drill holes until you get a feel for the tool. (If you’re having trouble, refer to the drill’s use and care manual for further guidance.)

You’d be amazed at what falls in the cracks! One Christmas, my husband gave me a beautiful pair of earrings, and I lost one. It was tiny, and I’d given up ever finding it again. But when I repaired a crack in a dining room floorboard, what do you think I found?

You’ll need the following:

A combination bit, or screw pilot, is the right bit for drilling a pilot hole and countersinking the fastener. The bit is graduated to a larger diameter at the top, allowing the fastener head to be countersunk with a nail set (if it’s a nail) or a screwdriver (if it’s a screw). If you’re not sure of bit length, check with your hardware store salesperson.

This and upcoming chapters call for the electric drill and various bits. I don’t know about you, but I have trouble sometimes judging whether a bit is “slightly smaller” than my fastener. I’m at that stage of life where I need reading glasses for all close-up work. If you also have trouble when comparing bits and fasteners, keep a drill gauge in your pocket or purse when you buy fasteners and corresponding bits in the hardware store or home center.

Your fastener should fit through the next size larger hole in the gauge than the correct hole for your drill bit. (The following illustration is a sample of what a gauge looks like; real gauges have the fractional sizes of each hole marked.) The fastener should be larger than the pilot hole, because you want the fastener to grab the wood (or other material) that surrounds the pilot hole. You want that fastener to fit tightly. With a drill gauge there’s no more guessing.

You may notice warping boards in the winter, when your heating system starts to dry things out, and wood fiber starts to shrink as it loses its natural moisture. If this is a persistent problem in your house, you may want to put more moisture into the air by using humidifiers in winter months.

This is a fix for a badly warped board; it doesn’t yet look like Mount Everest, but creates a slight rise that looks weird and presents a possible tripping hazard.

You’ll need the following:

Loose boards are a fairly easy fix. If you can get to them from underneath, the solution is invisible, but this is only possible if you’ve got an unfinished ceiling below the floor, as in a basement or garage.

If you are so blessed, you’ll need the following:

After all the effort it took to find the right board, the good news is, you don’t have to cover the screws on the unfinished ceiling with wood putty. Phew!

To fix the loose board from above, you’ll need the following:

Squeaks are caused by pieces of flooring rubbing together. When my children were teenagers, I never bothered to fix the squeaks in the floor. In fact, I liked them. The more they squeaked, the easier it was to detect the patter of adolescent feet, sneaking in past curfew.

Here are two ways to try to silence a squeaky floor. For the first strategy, you’ll need the following:

For the second strategy you’ll need the following:

Coat the glazier’s points in graphite, and then hammer them between offending floorboards. To do this, tap the hammer on the edge of the blade of the putty knife, using the opposite edge of the putty knife to push the points between the boards. Make sure the points don’t protrude from the spaces so that they stick out above the boards (ouch!). The graphite-coated points act as space holders to keep the boards away from each other.

If the offending floor is in a room above an unfinished basement or garage, you can try to stop squeaks with yet a third strategy.

You’ll need the following:

Again, you’ll need a friend to walk around upstairs to locate the squeaky parts of the floor. Wherever the floor is squeaking, tap a shim into the space between the joist and the subfloor. Be sure to wear safety goggles to protect your eyes from falling debris.

Vinyl flooring in sheets and tiles is everywhere; it holds up to a lot of hard wear, which is probably why it’s known as resilient. Cork and asphalt tile are also known as resilient flooring, but vinyl dominates.

The routine for maintaining a resilient floor is fairly simple: regular sweeping, vacuuming, damp-mopping, and occasional waxing to renew the surface when its factory-applied wear layer starts to wear thin. But sometimes, bad stuff happens to perfectly good floors.

At our house we had a bad habit of bringing home the pizza and putting it in the oven on a low setting to warm it up, still in its box. One day, my son was home alone and tried to warm up the pizza I’d left on the counter. It was still in the box; I don’t know the oven temperature he set.

The box caught fire, my son threw it on the vinyl floor and doused it with water and baking soda. No one was hurt, and the only damage was a nice, 2” square burn mark in the middle of the kitchen floor. You can be sure that no one in my house ever put a pizza box in the oven again! My heart still beats fast when I think of the dumb example I set for my children.

We were years away from renovating the kitchen, but fortunately I had some leftover tile. Here’s how I made the repair.

You must have a replacement tile for this one. Bring your replacement tile to the floor or hardware store and get the right adhesive and solvent.

You’ll also need the following:

If any adhesive comes up between the new tile and the adjacent ones, clean it with the solvent according to directions. Set the new tile level with the surrounding pieces; if it’s too low, pull it up and add more adhesive.

If it’s too high, press it down hard, and clean up any excess adhesive that squishes up at the edges with the solvent. Don’t walk on the floor until the repair dries completely (check drying time on the adhesive container).

If you look at the illustrations for patching a hole in wallpaper in Chapter 5, this repair is done in a similar way, just with a different material. Again, you’ll need a leftover piece of flooring, enough to cover the damage and match the pattern.

You’ll also need the following:

Many floor patterns have imprinted seams in the shapes of blocks, bricks, or other geometric forms. Try to make your patch so the edges fall within the pattern’s seams; it will be less noticeable.

Removal and replacement are exactly the same as the fix for replacing a tile. Use the same tools and materials, and follow Steps 1-6 for “Replacing a Vinyl Tile,” described earlier. You’ll be substituting your patch for the replacement tile, but the procedure is the same.

If you drop a pot or a tool and break a tile, or if the grout is chipping away, you can handle replacement and grout repair by following the instructions for wall tile repairs in Chapter 5. It will actually be a bit easier working on the floor instead of the wall!

To keep your floor grout in shape, you should treat it every year or two with sealant. This will make it easier to clean; it also keeps out the water you use when mopping—repeated soaking will degrade unsealed grout.

Wall-to-wall carpeting feels great under your feet on a cold morning. And manufacturers have worked hard to perfect carpet technology so that this stuff is more stain resistant than ever. When you have new carpet installed, be sure to ask the dealer or installer to provide manufacturer’s specifications for cleaning the type of fiber your carpet is made of (file it in your home workbook!); knowing this info will help you when someone drops something nasty on it down the road.

Sometimes you just have to get beneath your carpeting—a squeaky floor, perhaps, or a run of pipe that’s in a crawl space the plumber can’t get to from below.

Wall-to-wall carpet is usually attached around the perimeter of your room by means of narrow furring strips that are nailed to the subfloor along the walls. These furring strips are treacherous! The carpet sticks to them by means of dozens of protruding carpet tacks. So lifting the carpet for any reason can hurt you if you’re not prepared.

You’ll need the following:

You’ll also need to move any furniture that obstructs the area you’re trying to get at. Ease the heavy lifting by asking a friend or family member to help you with the moving. Four hands are also better than two when you’re trying to move carpet. Its backing material—the stiff burlapy stuff that holds the fiber—is tough and sometimes heavy.

The process is simple.

Many years ago, I was invited to a cocktail party at the home of a very famous writer and his equally illustrious wife. They lived in a beautiful brownstone townhouse in Manhattan. It had just been decorated: white rug, white upholstery—it was a blizzard in there! I made the mistake of taking a glass of red wine, and of course someone bumped me from behind. The full glass of red wine began to seep ominously into the pristine carpet. I was horrified, and sure that replacing the rug would take all of my salary for a year or two.

Fortunately, the hostess was as smart as she was famous, and also most gracious to a young, clumsy woman (me). She quickly retrieved a towel and a bottle of club soda from the kitchen and blotted up the red wine. The blotting, the towel, and the club soda did the job perfectly. Her rug was saved, as was my equilibrium.

In addition to keeping plenty of clean towels and club soda on hand for clumsy guests at cocktail parties, here are the ABCs of spot and spill cleaning:

You should keep a bottle of carpet spot remover with your cleaning supplies just in case of spills. Read the label, as not all removers work for every type of spot.

There are hundreds of substances that can leave their mark; refer to Appendix B for some good websites with further information on treating different kinds of stains.

Here are a couple of general guidelines:

Pet urine can really mess up a carpet. I won’t get into the psychology of why cats and dogs suddenly lose their manners. That’s a subject for another book, but here’s what you can do to take care of this business, pronto.

For stains that are still wet, follow these steps. You’ll need the following:

For stains that have already dried, try this:

Go to a pet store and find an odor neutralizing product and follow the instructions. These special solutions contain enzymes that work on the odor caused by urine. My friends and I, pet owners all, swear by a liquid neutralizer called Nature’s Miracle, but there are other enzyme-based cleaners that also do the trick. The key is to follow the directions and repeat applications if needed. And repeat after me, blot the spots, don’t rub them.

If Spot or Fluffy returns to the “spot,” it means you haven’t gotten rid of all the odor. Repeat the process, or go to the more radical solution, described next.

When all else fails, a badly discolored stain, a burn, or a tear in your wall-to-wall carpet can be cut out and replaced with a patch. This technique works on cut pile carpets; a patch is hard to hide on a looped pile rug. If you’ve got the latter, it’s time to call in the professionals, or put a nice area rug over the bad spot.

This repair requires a piece of carpet that matches what you’ve got. Hopefully, you’ve saved your leftovers from the installation. If not, and you’ve carpeted a closet with the same material, cut a piece from a back corner or from under a piece of furniture. I’ll never tell!

In addition, you’ll need the following:

With a finish that’s tougher than hardwood, floating laminate floors are a homeowner’s dream. It’s really difficult to hurt them. Manufacturers sell repair kits to hide any surface flaws that develop.

If a strip gets punctured or badly scratched and needs to be replaced, here’s how to proceed.

Fortunately, damage most often occurs in the hard-wear areas of a floor: at entryways and along high-traffic hallways. Because floating floors actually “float”—their tongue-and-groove, snap-together design is resting, but not nailed on an insulating underlayment—they can be removed without pulling nails or sawing them apart.

If the damaged piece is close to a wall, the replacement is something like taking apart a jigsaw puzzle, then putting it back together. All you need to do is carefully and gently remove the baseboard molding and, starting with the piece closest to the walls, disengage the tongues from their interlocking grooves until you reach the piece that needs to be replaced.

To do this repair, you’ll need a replacement piece to match the damaged one. And to remove baseboard molding, you’ll need the following:

If you’ve bent any nails, drive them through the backside of the molding, using the hammer and a nail set that matches the nail head. Drive in a new nail to replace the one you’ve removed. Countersink the nail; you can repair the nail holes with wood putty. When the putty dries, paint or use a wood-tone putty stick to match the baseboard.

Most ceilings are composed of drywall; in older homes, they may be plaster. You can use the same techniques used to repair wall flaws that are described in Chapter 5, with one difference: you’ll be working on a ladder. This means that you need to always wear goggles and some head protection (a cap or bandanna) to shield yourself from any debris that falls when you’re working. Follow the rules for ladder safety in Chapter 2. Be sure your stepladder is tall enough for you to work comfortably; remember, the rule of thumb is that a ladder gives you its height, plus 4 feet, as its total comfortable upward reach.

Some ceilings are in terrible trouble. Plaster is chipping, and perhaps the cracks or holes you already repaired are not holding their own. There may be underlying structural damage, or a leak somewhere above the ceiling. Water stains are a clue that the damage extends beyond wear and tear; moisture is coming from a leaky roof or pipe. Badly damaged ceilings take a lot of work and time, and you should call a pro if your ceiling’s “time” has come.