AOA Cleaning and Restoration offers a range of services to commercial and residential customers throughout Northern New Jersey, including flood cleanup, mold removal and mitigation, sewage cleanup, and disaster/trauma repair and recovery, but did you know that we also provide professional cleaning services and wood sports floor recoating?

Our recommendation is to refinish heavily used gym floors at least once a year to make them shine, but also to remove scratches, fix deteriorating wood, repair cracks, and scrub to recoat areas that have any peeling finish. Uneven, scratched floors in disrepair can be quite dangerous, so it’s important to uphold your investment by caring for your gym floors properly.

Tips for Gym Floor Maintenance

While periodic refinishing is important, preventative maintenance and regular cleaning can extend the life of your floor significantly. Here are five tips to care for your gym floors:

1. Keep out the dirt. It’s easier said than done, but do your best to keep dirt off the gym floor by requiring clean gym shoes, or at a minimum, by installing walk-off mats at every entry. These mats help absorb any water, dirt, and mud before people enter the gym.
2. Dry mop every day. Dust and dirt are the enemy of a sport court, scratching the surface as people walk across and causing slippage for athletes on the floor. Older buildings tend to have more dust, but all buildings accumulate dust every day. Be sure to sweep and dry mop your gym floor each day and clean and vacuum all walk-off mats.
3. Make sure all chairs and tables have felt pads. Chairs are a major culprit when it comes to scratching a gym floor, so make sure you only use rubber- or felt-bottomed chairs on your floor. You can also put felt pads on objects that need to slide across the floor often or use floor board to roll heavy things like bleachers (to avoid denting).
4. Don’t leave standing water. Wet mopping is important to minimize dust on the floor, but excess water can damage the wood. Never leave big puddles of water or water/cleaning solution on the floor. If possible, use a commercial cleaner that uses the appropriate amount of moisture (and works much faster than hand mopping).
5. Use the right products. Gym floors should be tacky enough that athletes can run on them and not slip. For this reason, any cleaner used should clean your sealed wood sport court and minimize its slickness with a tacking At AOA Cleaning & Restoration, we follow the Buckeye Reflections Wood Floor Program. This provides environmentally safe, VOC compliant water-based floor coatings, and high-performance, VOC-compliant Coliseum oil-based wood floor coatings. Along with Buckeye’s other great products (Screen Clean, Tenacity Pre-Cleaner, and Green Light Daily Cleaner), we feel this is the best way to care for your gym floor.

Call AOA Cleaning & Restoration at 201-848-8600 to learn more about what we can do for you and the Buckeye Wood Floor Program. We’ll be happy to share more about our gym floor scrub to refinishing and maintenance program and take a look at your sport court to offer recommendations and a more specific process to keep it in great shape year round.