Winter is associated with holiday cheer, hot chocolate, and beautiful snow-covered landscapes, but all that snow poses a problem for your hardwood floor. Winter precipitation means that you need to take a few extra steps to protect against staining hardwood floors. Old Reliable Floor Co in Cincinnati, OH has been refinishing and restoring hardwood floors for the past 70 years, and they have these tips to help your floors make it to spring:

• Embrace The Floor Mat: You may keep a welcome mat outside your front door all year-round, but a wet winter requires more coverage. Place additional mats or rugs inside every door, and encourage your family members and visitors to use them. You can even find mats that blend in with your home décor so that they don’t look out of place.
• Enforce A No Shoe Rule: 

  

  If there’s a foot of snow on the ground, it won’t matter how many times you wipe. It will be impossible to soak up all of that moisture with a mat, and road salt can do serious damage to hardwood floors. Your best defense against this is to designate an area to leave shoes. Ideally, this would be a garage or mud room, but even consolidating the wet shoes into a corner will help keep your floors dry.

• Pay Attention To Pets: You can’t ask your pets to take their boots off before entering, so it will be up to you to wipe their paws for them before they go bounding into the house. You can train your dog to wait by the door for you to dry them off, but a more immediate solution is to keep an old towel at the ready.

Even small puddles of water can have damaging effects, leading you in need to refinish hardwood floors. If something does go wrong and your floor gets damaged, there’s no need to worry. Old Reliable Floor Co will be there for restoring hardwood floors so that they look like new again. Visit their website to find out more information about how they can refinish hardwood floors, or give them a call at (513) 922-5598.