Clean and Fix Flood-Damaged Wood Flooring

It may seem like an impossibility, but wood flooring that has come into contact with huge amounts of water...and we're talking floods, major household catastrophes, etc., not "my kid got out of the tub without drying off"...this wood can be saved.

Take comfort, first, in the fact that wood is a thing of water. As a tree, wood is about 90% water. After the tree is cut and dried in a kiln for lumber, the moisture content drops to about 8%, give or take. And moisture content in wood goes up or down, according to seasons.

That said, water-damaged hardwood flooring can take only so much of this. Wood flooring that has had standing (pooled) water for a long period of time probably cannot be saved. The prescription for saving water-damaged wood floor is mainly two-fold:

1. Get to it fast.
2. Scrub it down vigorously with a combination of cleaning ingredients.