hey it's carrie from lovely etc and today i'm going to show you the best way to fill in
scratches and gouges in your hardwood floors i have really beautiful engineered hardwood
floors that i installed about five years ago and i still love them so much but over the years they
have gotten quite a few scratches and even little gouges i have three little boys and we're pretty
hard on our house so it's definitely time for me to fill in and cover up all of the imperfections
so today i'm going to test a couple of different popular ways to fill in and cover up scratches
in your floors and show you the best way to do it my floors are engineered hardwoods so the methods
that you would use to fix scratches and holes in real hardwood floors you can't always use for
engineered hardwood floors because they don't have the same wood all the way through however what i'm
using to fix my engineered hardwood floors should work just fine on regular solid hardwood floors as
well so after doing some research about the best way to take care of my floors i went on amazon and
bought a couple of the most popular products to try out i have this system and also this so i'm
going to test both of these on my floors and see which method gives the best results is the
easiest to do and just works best all around okay so first of all i have this wood filler kit inside
the kit are 12 different colors of wood filler i thought i would really love this first kit because
it seemed really easy to use but in reality it was really difficult to custom match colors to match
my floors and the consistency wasn't quite thick enough to really fill in the scratches and gouges
so i can't recommend this kit luckily i had way better results from the second kit that i tried
this is the second kit that i bought and it's kind of a two-for-one deal because it has markers for
touching up little scratches and things where you really just need to make the color blend in better
but it also has these little crayons which are a wood filler and it comes with a sharpener even so
you can make the point really sharp if you need to for a tiny area and you just kind of use these
to fill in and color at the same time using this kit is really simple you warm up the wax crayons
use them to fill in any holes or gouges or scratches so that they're more even with the
rest of the floor and then scrape off any excess and then use the markers to match the color to
the surrounding floor you can also totally skip the crayons and just use the markers for more
superficial scratches sounds simple enough but i found that it does have a bit of a learning curve
at first i had a really hard time figuring out how to make the scratches truly blend in and become
unnoticeable but i kept trying and i figured out a few tricks that really help the wax crayons
are meant to be used to fill in the scratches so that they are even with the rest of the floor and
the instructions said to warm them before using them so at first i tried just holding them in
my fist for several seconds to warm them up with my body heat but it really did not work very well
so i did some brainstorming and realized that a hair dryer was the perfect solution when i
warmed the tip of the crayon with the hair dryer for about 10 seconds it heated it up just enough
that the wax could perfectly drip right into those cracks and melt into them and make a perfectly
smooth surface but it also didn't heat up the rest of the crayon so i didn't just have a melted mess
another thing i found it said in the instructions that you should start with one of the lighter
markers but my floors are really dark so i pulled out like the two or three colors that looked
closest to my floor and went with the lightest one of those well that was a mistake because
even though it looked a little lighter than my floor once i had applied it it really looked much
darker when you're fixing a scratch or something on your floor if in the end it's a little bit
lighter than the surrounding wood it just still blends in but if it's darker that draws your eye
to it and then you can see oh that looks like there was a scratch there so really start with
a color that's several shades lighter than you think you need because you can always make it
darker you can layer the markers as needed so if it's not quite dark enough you can once it's dried
do a second coat of that same color or you can do a second coat of a darker color if it
needs to be way darker but once it's on there and it's too dark there's not really a lot you can do
the other thing is you need to be really quick when you are using the markers to wipe off any
excess because it dries in i mean probably five or six seconds so you want to do kind of a small
area and then wipe everything off before moving to the next area and when you do that it works
beautifully because the marker whatever's in there just sticks to the like dry raw exposed wood and
not to the wood around it that's still sealed and so it corrects the color of the scratches without
messing up the rest of the floor so in the end i really love the crayon marker combo it worked
really great for both filling in the holes and also correcting the color of slight scratches as
well as bigger gouges and now i'm excited to try using these markers to fix up a few scratches on
some wood furniture that i have because somehow it seems like there's always something that
is scratched or broken or needs repairs if you haven't i'd love you to subscribe to my channel
lovely etc where i share lots of inexpensive diy ideas for creating home that you love