Narrator: Dark, muddy-looking floors like this
are a floor refinisher's worst nightmare
and oftentimes make it nearly impossible
for them to do their job.
That's because these floors have layers
upon layers of thick wax.
This wax comes from DIY products
sold at hardware stores,
which are meant to be short-term solutions
to revitalize wood floors.
These are acrylic waxes,
and they're extremely soft
and don't harden up or cure.
They sit on top of the floors
instead of soaking in, allowing dirt, soil,
and any airborne contaminants to bond to them.
And when homeowners are cleaning the floors,
they take the soil from the surface
and push it into the wax.
That's where Courtney Lee and his team
at Truman's Hardwood Floor Refinishing come in.
The team of floor technicians
specialize in hardwood-floor restoration,
and their most popular service
is wax removal from hardwood floors.
Floor refinishing requires sanding off
existing coatings on the floor,
but this is difficult to do
with these layers of wax sitting on top,
because the wax will likely clog up the sanders.
The team comes in to emulsify the wax,
which takes it back to a liquid form
and allows them to extract it from the floors.
Buildup like this happens over five to 20 years.
Sometimes there's too much wax for them to remove,
and the floors need to be replaced.
If they can remove the wax,
the team will come in, remove all the furniture,
and spray the floors with an emulsifier.
They let it sit for some time,
depending on the severity and amount of wax.
They do this section by section.
They follow up with extraction tools,
which remove the wax from the floors into the machine.
Depending on how much wax there is,
they repeat this two to three times.
This round machine is called a buffer.
It runs at a low speed during the screening process.
There is a soft pad and a mesh screen on the bottom,
which comes in different grits.
The screen scratches off the old polyurethane
so they can apply new polyurethane.
This is what seals and protects the hardwood floors
and is typically the final layer before the wax.
A splash guard is usually attached to the buffer
to keep the wax from slinging
onto the walls and baseboards.
In some cases, like here,
Courtney will scrape off the wax by hand.
He does this when there is too much buildup
on the floors.
He'll scrape up as much as possible
to prevent the wax from clogging up
the vacuums in their machines
and then remove the residual as normal.
Once Courtney removes the wax,
the floor is back to its bare original state.
In some cases,
depending on what the homeowners want to do,
he'll apply a new layer of polyurethane
to finish the job.