Jatoba Hardwood Floor Refinishing – Plan, Hire a Contractor and Care for Your New Floor

A Jatoba hardwood floor refinishing project – just like landscaping, remodeling, or interior design – takes careful planning and preparation to ensure a satisfying experience. While you know the finished product will invigorate your home, the fulfillment is that much deeper when the process is an enjoyable, stress-free and agreeable collaboration with your family and contractor. Jatoba, or Brazilian cherry as it is commonly known as, is a dense, rich hardwood that deepens in color as it ages, making it one of the most popular of the exotic hardwoods. If yours is an older flooring that has not been refinished in some time, the first thing to determine is whether it requires replacing or refinishing.     

Refinish or Replace

Barring any structural damage, excessive warping, deep stains, or chipping, your hardwood flooring is durable enough to be sanded and refinished six or seven times over its life. Just as with most hardwood flooring, Jatoba can be re-stained to match most interior design color palette changes. An experienced professional contractor will test stain a small inconspicuous area in the room for you or your interior designer to compare various color tones and depths.  

Repair Before Refinishing

Refinishing your Brazilian cherry floor provides an ideal opportunity to repair annoying squeaks and creaks that may disturb family members at night. Loose fitting panels can be fixed, filled or replaced and unsightly knots repaired.

The most important aspect of any hardwood repair and refinish project is to find an experienced and trusted contractor early in the process. Online resources like homestars.com and houzz.com are useful resources to not only qualify great contractors but to uncover insightful questions to ask, based on successful and not so successful experiences of people that have traversed the qualification, hiring, collaboration and finished product process with local professionals.

If you live in a major city like Toronto, there are hundreds of contractors that provide hardwood repair, refinish and installation services. If the experience is equally important as craftsmanship and equitable pricing, you may wish to consider using a refinishing services group. They screen hundreds of local contractors in your area and retain only the best contractors within the medium to high price range. They oversee and manage aspects of the communication process to ensure that your refinish project is fulfilling from your first inquiry to your first guests arriving after the project is completed.

Jatoba Hardwood Floor - Refinish or Recoat

If you have decided to refinish your home’s Jatoba floors, it’s a great opportunity to enrich the experience of the room, to accent the furniture and fixtures of a room, and to refresh the first impressions of your home. A professional refinish application adds years to its durability.

If your objective is simply to revive the sheen and repair minor blemishes such as light scratches and scuffs, a full sand and refinish may not be necessary. Two effective solutions to consider are "buff and coat” and recoating. The applications are similar in that the top layer finish is buffed down rather than sanded and replaced with a new topcoat layer.

Recoating contains an additional step: the removal of chemical contaminants − like acrylic floor cleaners, oily furniture polish, soaps and waxes − that impede the adhesion effectiveness of refinish top coats.

While both applications leave you with gleaming hardwood, the more comprehensive recoating process retains the top coat longer, adding durability and a longer interval before your next refinish application is needed.                

If you have pets, young children, or high-traffic areas in the home, recoating is a worthwhile consideration.  

The Right Finish for Your Jatoba Floor

Choosing the right finish for your hardwood is a combination of selecting the material and the color tone – if the project is a complete sanding and refinishing project, rather than buffing and recoating.  Jatoba naturally reddens with age, and many people prefer to preserve that deep cherry appearance in older floors. There are bleaching products that lighten a hardwood’s natural color. If your intention is to lighten an older Jatoba floor its best to check with an experienced contractor about your specific flooring before making interior design commitments.

The refinish base you choose will depend on a combination of features and benefits: durability, odor during application, drying time, maintenance and ease of repair.

No single surface finish provides the best of all traits. Here are a few of the options to consider:

· Water-based finish: Mild odor during application, two- to three-hour dry time, optimum durability

· Oil-based finish: Moderate odor during application, eight-hour drying time, optimum durability

· Tung Oils: Penetrating and hardening oils, easily maintained and repaired, durable, provides a wet look   

There are other alternative oils and finishes to consider for your project. An experienced refinish professional will be able to explain and advise you based on the needs and limitations of your project.  

Caring for Your Jatoba Hardwood Floor

You may wish to consider care and maintenance for your Jatoba flooring while in the early stage of planning the project, especially if it requires complete sanding and refinishing. Finishes do vary in durability. 

Prevention is the best maintenance plan for your hardwood flooring. Where possible, consider minimizing footwear use that may drag in outdoor debris that can scratch or scuff the top coat finish. Pets with trimmed nails are friendlier to the finish and prevent excessive wear, scratching and prematurely dulling of the finish.  

Regular dusting with a damp mop, especially in high-traffic areas, helps to maintain the brilliant sheen of a Jabota floor and minimizes exposure to fine debris that may become ingrained. 

To avoid scuffs and scrapes when vacuuming it is best to limit their use to floor-brush attachments.

Electrostatic cloths can be a quick, clean and safe way to remove hard-to-see indoor and outdoor debris and dust. 

Spills left unattended for periods of time can dull your floor’s finish. Acidic sodas and oily cleaning products are best removed quickly and thoroughly.

It’s your family’s home. Spills and accidents will occur from time to time, and your new flooring finish is made to withstand day-to-day traffic.

So now it’s time to enjoy it!