Plank by Plank, My Unfinished Hardwood Floors. Simple Way to Clean Those Floors.

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We live in a house built in the 1940’s. We have original, unfinished oak hardwood floors. They could use a refinish.

Oh, to rewind the clock to 19 years ago when we first bought this house and refinish these hardwood floors before we moved all of our earthly belonging into its rooms. So many reasons why we did not. Tenants anxious to get into the house we were leaving. By the way, for us it was no fun being a landlord, so glad that is done. We were newly married and saving all of our pennies for the kitchen remodel this house desperately needed (two-tone painted orange cabinets, I’ll need to dig up old pictures to share some day, it was bad).

Now we are a family of four and many more possessions added over the years, and simply more busy and too exhausted to tackle this large job. So, I improvise. I like to try to clean with natural products when I can. My go to cleaner for these beautiful, old unfinished hardwood floors has been water and vinegar, sometimes a small amount of dish added when they are extra dirty.

Lately I have been looking for a way to add some more shine to our floors and research has advised to simply add some olive oil to my water and vinegar mixture. This seems to be working well for me. Many suggestions I have found strongly suggests not oversaturating my unfinished hardwood flooring during this process, so I try to follow that advice.

How I do this:

• I soak a clean rag/small towel with mostly water, a little vinegar (1-2 Tbsps. +/-) and a little olive oil (1-2 tsp. +/-) and I use the rag/small towel to clean the hardwood.

• I will rinse out the rag/small towel a few times and re-soak with the water, vinegar and olive oil while cleaning my floors.

• I sometimes will add a few drops of essential oil to add some yummy smells to our house.

• Now, another way would be to add water, vinegar, olive oil to a spray bottle and wipe with a clean rag, this would certainly cut down on excessive water sitting on the unfinished hardwood flooring.

Pretty cost efficient and that is wonderful as my kids and dogs sure do love to dirty up these old floors.