After 20 years of advising on wood flooring installations, we still find that builders can destroy beautiful floors. 

We always advise that the floor should be the very last product to be installed in any situation. All wet works and snagging should be completed before any wood flooring is delivered to the site.

If for whatever reason the floor needs to be installed before this, then we insist on the floor being protected if any other works are going to be carried out after installation. You should use a breathable membrane and then a hardboard to fully protect the floor. Make sure there are no gaps anywhere for any dust (especially plaster dust or plaster) to penetrate and get into the surface of the floor.

Please see the image below where plaster dust got onto the surface of the floor. 

Plaster dust and wet plaster are corrosive and will destroy any engineered wood floor surface. The worst action we find is that rather than using a powerful hoover machine with a brush (but with no bar underneath, which can damage a floor), people use water and a mop. All this will do is make the plaster dust wet and corrosive as it will “suck” up the water and have a whitening effect like the image below.

Below you can see what has happened by doing this and how the original floor looked. 

The only solution to this is to get a professional floor finished or sometimes a French polisher to resurrect the floor. Normal cleaning will not get rid of what you see in the images because it has destroyed the finish and penetrated the grain of the wood.

You can find out more about installing and maintaining all our engineered wood flooring here.