This intense hard floor maintenance process cleans all layers of the hard floor. This involves completely removing, or stripping, all the existing finish on the floor, deep cleaning the bare surface, sealing the surface to plug pores, and then putting new layers of protective finish back on. Stripping and refinishing should be done at least once per year and is vital to the performance, aesthetic appearance, and longevity of your flooring. When refinishing, the use of quality waxes can be well worth their additional cost. These waxes, which typically contain a high concentration of solids, are less labor intensive to apply as they allow for a faster film build in fewer coats. They also emit comparatively lower levels of volatile organic compounds as they cure.

Between full-scale stripping and refinishing, interim maintenance is required to preserve the sealants on your hard floors. One of these processes, scrubbing and refinishing, removes only the top layers of the existing finish and then covers the remaining layers with a new coat of finish. Scrubbing can extend the time between stripping and refinishing events, but the scrub-refinish cycle should be performed a limited number of times before stripping as numerous finish layers will build up, and require extra labor and products to remove.

These maintenance techniques that can keep your floors in good condition between stripping. They are similar processes that use the heat from friction created by machine weight and circular rotation of special pads to clean, polish, and harden the finishes on floors. The difference between them is their rotation speed and gloss appearance.