Hello good peeps of Reddit. I have been living in the same apartment for 2 years now the apartment has the old hardwood floor typical In apartments here in Helsinki.

I would like to polish or make them look better when I give the apartment back. What recommendations do you have to work on these? Removing scratches and stain specially in the kitchen area?

10 comments

  1. Don’t do anything by yourself. That is probably normal wear so it’s not your job to fix it. If it’s not seen as normal by your landlord, you should get a permission to fix it yourself before doing anything.

  2. Dont do it friend, the landlord will refinish the surface for the next one, if deemed necesssary for the growth of them moneybags

  3. Agreed, that’s normal wear and tear. It is wood so it will age and damage a bit over time. It should be expected to be refinished at some point and that is actually quite a bit of work.

  4. Don’t do anything. That’s an old ”mosaiikkiparketti”, looks like it’s from the 90s. Normal wear and tear. Landlord can sand and put a new finish on the floor when/if they want. Chances are they have no interest in doing that since they’re renting the place out.

  6. Fixing a parquet floor professionally is very expensive. We are talking about hundreds of euros per room.

  7. You can buy wax for hardwood floors. Kiilto-company sells them on regular markets and they cost something around ~5 euros. Try a tiny spot first on somewhere so you’ll see how it’s going to look.

  8. I redid a floor like that at my parents place. Had to rent out a 100kg floor sander to get even surface and another sander to to get the corners. After sanding I put down new layers of lacquer. All together everything was like 500€ and took 6 days 3 of which was for the moving of shelves and stuff from the floor. In the end the floor was good as new but I have experience.

  9. You’ve been told what not to do (anything) – but the answer what you’d do if it was sensible is; sand it down, then apply a few coats of lacquer on it (“it” being the whole continuous floor, where ever it extends to). This would take a few days and several hundred €…

  10. As everybody said, the scratches are normal wear, but the stains are water damage and most likely cannot be removed just by sanding the top layer.

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