Our new house is at the age where a lot of the systems and original parts are nearing the end of their life expectancy. The roof, furnace, water heater, bathroom faucets, and hardwood floors are pretty much all showing signs of wear and tear and either need to be replaced or shown a little love. Some areas of the hardwood floors are worse than others, but since refinishing all of our hardwood floors is neither in the budget to hire out nor high on my list of projects I want to do myself right now, I’ve been searching for an easy, short-term fix. Then one day recently I was looking through my project supplies arsenal and stumbled onto a super easy way to fix scratched hardwood floors in about five minutes.
If you have scratched hardwood floors, let me introduce you to your new best friend.
What Howard Restor-a-Finish is NOT is a full house refinishing system. It is great for spot touch ups as a temporary fix. I’ve used it on small surface scratches throughout the house and the results have been pretty spectacular.
To really show you the difference I took photos in the study, where there are deep gouges in the floor in one corner. I mean, deep. Something very heavy and very sharp must have been dragged very roughly across the floor here. I can only speculate.
There’s nothing to remove scratches this deep other than thorough sanding and refinishing, but the improvement here is still really significant, takes about five minutes, and makes these deep scratches much less noticeable. For less intense floor scratches, the method I used practically makes them disappear.
First you puddle a bit of the Restor-a-Finish on the floor on top of the scratched area. You should choose a color close to the shade of your floors – I used Walnut.
Then use a paper towel to rub it into the floor, paying special attention to working it into the scratched areas.
Then use a dry paper towel to rub over the area several times. I passed over it three times with a clean towel each time.
The scratches are still visible, but SO much less so than before. And when you use the Restor-a-Finish on smaller scratched areas, the scratches practically vanish.
You can buy Howard Restor-a-Finish HERE. It’s definitely worth the five minutes – you’ll be amazed at the results for how little effort it takes!
Looks good! I’ll have to try it instead of the brown marker I usually use.
I tried those markers on furniture legs before but this seems to work much better!
one of our new dining chairs made a scratch and i didn’t even think to get out my howard’s! need to!
It really worked so well on more slight scratches. especially if you already have it, give it a try!
LOVE this product! I use it when refinishing furniture quite frequently, but never thought to use it on our hardwoods. Thanks so much for the tip!
Angela @ Number Fifty-Three
It worked really well! I only thought of it as I was unpacking our things :)
What a huge difference for such big and deep scratches.
It really is. I can’t even imagine what caused the scratches. Other than a swordfight.
Thank you for your post today, it’s great information as I am busy trying to get my house ready to go on the market. Could you tell me if the only way to purchase it is thru Amazon or would it be available at stores like Home Depot? Thanks!
I got it a small local hardware store, actually. Home Depot, Lowes, Ace should all carry it!
That looks so much better! I definitely need to try this on our floors!
It is such a great short term fix. We’ll probably fully refinish eventually, but for now, this worked like a charm.
looks a lot better! Our hardwood isn’t scratched, but is faded from the sun, so i’ve been thinking about options .. we’ll probably need to sand and refinish since I want to run it into the kitchen too. Not looking forward to that!
We have some faded spots too and the Howard’s didn’t really do much for that. I think a full refinish is our future and I’m not really looking forward to that either… You should look into a dust extractor, it worked so well keeping the dust down to almost nothing when I sanded the butcher block counter.
We had that same problem on our floors. Someone told me to try and rub a walnut on the scratch. I was skeptical but it actually worked!
So interesting – just a regular old walnut? Like one one you’d eat? Must be the oils!
Yes, the kind you eat. The kids thought it was funny.
Shelled pecans work too.
Very cool, I’ll have to try this!
We had similar looking floors. The renters who stayed in the house before we bought it had a dining chair. WIth a nail sticking out of the bottom. Needless to say there are still gouges there but to this day I think of them. wtf?!
What?! That is ridiculous. Why in the WORLD would they not deal with the nail?? Baffling.