The real benefit of laminate is it doesn't take much to clean

If you want to keep your laminate wood floors looking great for years to come their are a few laminate wood floor cleaning procedures that you need to take. If you vacuum make sure you use an attachment designed for wood floors. Running a vacuum with the power head or beater block will scratch the floor and it could start to take of the shine. When the floor needs to be washed or cleaned, mop it using a no-wax cleaner.

There are inexpensive cleaners sold in stores that are designed just for cleaning laminate flooring. Regular detergents and soap products will build up on the floor and start to make it look dull and lusterless.

You can clean up stains caused by chocolate, grease, juice and even wine with the no-wax cleaner. To remove crayon, lipstick, shoe polish, or even nail polish with mineral spirits, nail polish remover or a denatured alcohol. For pen and pencil marks I always use an eraser, I find this to work the best.

Never use steel wool to clean your laminate wood floor.

Laminate floors do not require any type of wax and will not look any better if you use one. All you will do is to start a buildup of wax that will dull the shine.

Preventive maintenance tip:

To keep your scratches of your floor from dirt and little bits of rock from outside, place a floor mat or area rug at each end of the room by the doorways. This will catch any dirt from being tracked inside. Put a rug in high traffic areas too like in front of the kitchen sink and front entrance-way. If you want to know of a good online store to buy a cheap area rug go here. Any rug laid over top of laminate wood flooring should have an under pad so that it doesn't slip. If the underlay reacts to your floor and it shouldn't, you can clean it with ammonia. The only way I can think of is if someone had spilt a liquid on the area rug and it soaked through to the under pad and was not cleaned up properly.

After installation vacuum the floor to pick up any left over debris that might cause a scratch. Place felt pads under chair legs, table legs to avoid scratches. You can also replace metal casters with rubber ones.

If you do scratch your floor and it is deep so that it shows a different color you can hide it with a matching felt pen or crayon. Another way and probably the best way is to replace the plank but this is much harder. You can also save your wood dust when installing and sprinkle it into the scratch with a tiny bit of wood glue.

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