A recoat bonds to the coating already on the floor. These are the checks that decide whether that bond will hold.
Where the coating has worn through to bare wood, the new coat sits on wood in those spots and on old finish everywhere else. It shadows at every worn patch and a second coat does not hide it.
Acrylic floor polish and oil soaps leave a film that a waterborne coat will not bond to. The floor can look perfect and still be unsuitable. A solvent wipe tells us before the whole room is committed.
We abrade and coat a small area out of sight, let it cure and test it. Unknown factory finishes get the same treatment rather than an assumption.
Loose boards, exposed fasteners and moving sections are dealt with first. A coat laid over movement splits along the same line within a season.
Rooms emptied, pets kept out of the coated area and the furnace fan considered while the coat goes down and cures.
A recoat is not the moment to change colour, but it is the moment to change sheen. Matte and low-satin finishes hide fine scratching and settled dust. Higher gloss reflects it and prints every line of grit damage across a traffic lane. If the existing floor is glossier than you want it, say so before we screen. Going down in sheen is straightforward, and whatever goes on now is the surface you live with until the next recoat.
Flooring Experts Calgary recoats hardwood floors in Calgary that are worn rather than damaged. Floor recoating and full refinishing are routinely quoted as the same thing, and they are not.
A screen and recoat abrades the existing finish with a fine abrasive on a buffer or planetary machine, keys the surface so new finish can grip, then rolls a fresh coat over the top. The wood is never exposed. Nothing leaves the floor except a few microns of old coating.
The payoff is a fresh sacrificial layer. Finish is the part that takes the wear; wood is the part you cannot replace. Renew the coating while it is still continuous and the boards underneath never meet a boot. The floor reads evenly again too, because screening takes off the dulled, micro-scratched top of the old coat rather than the coat itself.
Screening never reaches raw wood, so stain colour cannot change. It will not flatten a cupped board, will not remove a gouge, and will do nothing about gaps. Through a Calgary heating season indoor relative humidity routinely falls below 30%, under Health Canada's winter guidance of roughly 30 to 35% and below the 35 to 55% band the National Wood Flooring Association ties to dimensional stability. Boards shrink and gaps open. A coat of finish cannot bridge them.
A recoat is maintenance, and maintenance has a window. Once the coating is gone in the traffic lanes the option goes with it and the floor becomes a sanding job.
Calgary shortens that window. When road surfaces drop below -5°C the City treats them with pickle, a mix of roughly 3% salt and 97% fine gravel, and the gravel comes indoors on boots for months. Abrasive grit in a traffic lane cuts through finish far faster than foot traffic alone. It is the reason the hallway inside a Calgary back door reaches bare wood while the dining room still looks close to new.
Grit control extends the window: a full-width mat at every entry, boots off at the door, and a dry sweep through the lanes often enough that gravel is not walked in circles. Floors treated that way stay recoatable for years longer than floors that are not.
Three questions settle it. Is the finish still continuous across the whole floor? Is the colour staying as it is? Is the damage limited to the coating rather than the wood?
Three yes answers make it a recoat. A no on colour, or a no on damage, moves the job to a full sand. A floor whose wear layer is already thin, or an engineered floor with very little real wood left above the core, may be past both and into replacement.
Full sanding and refinishing sits in a CAD planning range of roughly $3 to $7 per square foot in Calgary. A recoat is a smaller scope and sits below that range, but the only figure worth acting on comes after an adhesion test and a measure. Both are planning ranges, not quotes.
Refinishing sands through the old coating into raw wood and starts again. Recoating abrades only the coating and adds to it. That difference is why a recoat cannot change stain colour, cannot flatten a cupped board and cannot remove a gouge, and why it costs and disrupts far less when the floor qualifies.
It depends on traffic, on how much grit reaches the floor and on how it is cleaned. A recoat is maintenance rather than a reset, so we set a point to look at the floor again instead of promising a span of years. A floor with mats at every entry and a regular dry sweep through the traffic lanes holds its coating far longer than one without.
Often yes, but two things change. Factory aluminium-oxide finishes need the right abrasive and an adhesion test before anyone commits. And the bevel between boards holds dirt, so those lines stay visible after the recoat rather than filling in.
No, it is a different process. A hardwax oil floor is cleaned, lightly abraded and re-oiled rather than screened and coated with a film finish. The two systems are not interchangeable and a film finish laid over oil will not bond. Tell us which system is on the floor, or we will test for it.
Rooms in the work area need to be cleared and stayed off. Whether you can remain elsewhere in the home depends on the product, ventilation and layout. Access, odour and return-to-use timing all come from the data sheet for the actual finish being used, and we go through that before booking.