How layers of wax buildup are removed from hardwood floors

• Truman's Hardwood Floor Refinishing & Cleaning removes layers of wax buildup from hardwood floors. 
• This wax comes from DIY products, which are usually only short-term solutions.
• This wax sits on top of the wood instead of soaking in, making it hard to refinish the floors.

The following is a transcription of the video.

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.