Time To Replace Your Floors? How To Choose A Smarter Upgrade

Your floor is trying to tell you something and most of the warning signs show up long before a full failure. We walk through what we see every week at BPS Southeast Flooring: carpet that stays dirty even after a real professional clean, traffic lanes that never bounce back, edges that fray, and transitions that start to separate. If the room still smells “off” after you’ve done everything right, we talk about why the issue is often trapped in the pad or even the subfloor, especially for pet owners.

Then we zoom out to hard surfaces. We explain the difference between cosmetic scuffs and true finish failure on hardwood, what it means when you’re wearing through the clear coat into stain and raw wood, and why hardwood refinishing depends on what you installed in the first place. We also get specific about luxury vinyl plank and laminate flooring lifespan. Cheap products can look great at first, but heavy traffic can wear through the print layer, moisture can damage laminate edges, and discontinued box store styles can make “small repairs” impossible.

Maintenance is the quiet hero of long-term flooring value. We share the cleaning habits that protect your flooring warranty, why certified professional carpet cleaning schedules matter, and how everyday grime, body oils, and kitchen grease can spread through a home and act like sandpaper on your floors. If you’re in Western North Carolina or Upstate South Carolina and trying to decide whether to clean, repair, refinish, or replace, this conversation gives you a clear way to think about cost, durability, and health at home.

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To learn more about BPS Southeast Flooring visit:
https://www.BPSSoutheast.com
BPS Southeast Flooring 
Servicing Rutherford, Polk, Henderson and Cleveland County 
828-532-2141 

Transcript

Welcome To Salty Sporting

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the BPS Salty Sporting Podcast with beautiful spaces. Start from the ground. Hosted by Jason Quinn BPS Tealty to the homeowner, businesses, interior design, and screen modelers and flippers across Western North Carolina and upstate South Carolina. From luxury vinyl and hardwood to carpet and tile. If it goes underfoot, we've got to cover it. Expect practical tips, money-saving insights, and the occasional bad dad joint. Because around here, it's flooring for everyone. Let's roll without the bubbles.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

From wear and tear to hidden damage, here are the signs your flooring is past its prime and how to make the smartest long-term investment. Welcome. I'm Julie Schwenzer, co-host and producer with Jason Trim, the owner of BPS Southeast Flooring. Jason, we're excited to hear more advice from you.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

Glad to be here.

Carpet Wear You Cannot Clean

SPEAKER_00 0:58

So let's get into it. Today's question for you: how do I know when it's time to replace my flooring?

Hardwood Finish And Refinishing Limits

Budget Vinyl And Laminate Lifespan

SPEAKER_02 1:04

Typically, it's when it stays dirty after professional cleaning, is a good sign that it needs to be replaced. So for like carpet, um, if you after you after you clean it, and the areas that typically get the most wear and tear don't look as good as the areas like under your coffee table or underneath the end table or around. If you move your furniture out and it's literally like a shiny carpet to a really dull, worn-out carpet, I would consider it. Other signs would be it's just starting to come away from transitions, it's starting to fray at the edges. Or the most blatant stuff is your dog's clawed a hole at the core because it was stuck in a bedroom where the clad's done the same thing, it's gone potty on the carpet and it just doesn't smell good anymore. There's there's the worst case scenarios, but typically for carpet, it's just when it stops being able to be cleaned anymore, you want to replace it. When it comes to other surfaces such as hardwood, if the finish on the surface is starting to get where you're getting past the finish and starting to get into raw wood, so you've gotten past the clear coat and then the actual stained surface, you're gonna start getting into raw wood, and then depending on the type of wood, if it's an engineered floor, some contractor grade engineer wood floors are not refinishable. So once you've gone through all that, you're just gonna be able to tear it out. Some wood floors may be solid, so you can sand them and refinish them, even some engineered floors, so sometimes they have a thick enough surface where you can re-sand it, refinish it, and make it look new again. That that's pretty common, and a lot of people in my area in western North Carolina like solid wood because they have the idea in the back of their head that maybe one day we'll have to sand and refinish it. My question on those are are you buying wood flooring and already getting ready to refinish it before you've even installed it? Because if you properly take care of it and a lot of the factory finishes available now are so durable, you should be able to get a good 20 to 30 years out of them with proper care. So some of them things are variables. The ones that are more likely to be replaced is if they go with an inexpensive laminate or an inexpensive luxury vinyl, they're not really made to go long-term life. Vinyl, when you get these really inexpensive products at Lowe's or Home Depot or Floor and Decor, 10 years, 15 years, you might see a heavy traffic area start to wear through the actual print through the vinyl surface and start seeing bald spots where you just walk the walk the surface off of it. Laminate, you might see damage of moisture on the edges over time because you got something that looks really good and it holds up for a period of time, but it's not made for a lot of spills on a regular basis. So if you have an animal that may find a spot that you're having to clean up on a regular basis, you'll start to see places where it's starting to buckle or have physical visual damage. Um, those are areas where you you'd have to replace the whole floor because by the time you actually get to those, they don't make that color and product anymore. So you can't go back to those box stores and get the same product and replace those damaged areas to make the floor look good again. So typically you'll have to replace the whole floor, which can be pretty expensive, but it's one of those if you go back with a better product, I'm not, and I never tell a customer to go back with the most expensive product. I mean, I I I'll let you spend your money where you want. If you want the most expensive product, I'm glad to sell it to you. But it but if you're looking for we have pets, we have these things, what are good products to put in, it may not be the it's not gonna be as cheap as a floor and decor or Home Depot or Lowe's product, but I can warrant you if they're using patented locking systems, so things don't get through it and they don't come apart. I don't carry anything like on a luxury vinyl that's less than a 20 mil wear layer, which is like your standard minimum commercial laminates, everything's like in your high scratch ratings of three, four, and five. There's nothing out of a one or two in my store. So when you come to rated quality products, most of the products in a retail store will be a higher rated product. So you do pay more, but you're gonna get a much longer life out of it.

Cleaning Schedules And Warranty Rules

SPEAKER_00 5:33

And I also want to, you know, tell the audience too, you have a professional background in uh cleaning as well. So you you know that I'm sure helps you see things in a different way too, because you can see what could be replaced or repaired. Does that come up a lot?

Grease Dirt And Hidden Abrasion

SPEAKER_02 5:49

It does. The benefit every product that you buy, there's usually a piece of paper in the box that says warranty or installation or care procedures, or you can download it, either way. Within, let's say carpet, they're expecting you to professionally clean. That's like pay someone. This is not rug doctor, this is not your bistle that you get at Walmart. This is you pay a professional cleaner who is certified to come in and clean your home at least every 12 to 18 months to keep your warranty. So if you don't do that, your warranty is usually void right off the first year, year and a half. When I took carpet cleaning classes, my instructor gave everybody the question of how often do you need to clean your carpet? And his answer was, it depends. There is no right or wrong answer. The best answer is if you have a lot of traffic and it's used a lot, you need to clean it more frequently. Because as an instructor, this is the way he explained it. I had two teenager boys in college going to college at where we lived, and they were coming in and out with their friends, coming high traffic, come in, eat, go out, do sports, a lot of indoor and outdoor running in and out of the floor. He said, I clean my carpet every six months because it got a lot of wear and tear. So to keep it looking good, you cleaned it more frequently. If you wait for your flooring to start looking bad before you clean it, you're waiting too long. Because the what happens with any flooring surface, by the time you get that much dirt and grime buildup that you can physically see it, that's also grime and dirt that you're walking on and it's abrazing the surface and the protective coatings on all your surfaces. So once you clean all that dirt off, you've physically done damage to the floor that can be fixed at times, but not all the time. So if you're waiting to see how far you can go before you clean it, it's not going to be good for the flooring. So it's a luxury vinyl laminate, big key thing, sweep the floors and mop them on a semi-regular basis. There are cleaning procedures that you can pay someone that can clean wood floors to clean your vinyl laminate that will get that heavy buildup of body oils and cooking grease and things off of it that daily cleaning may not get because people don't realize that when you cook in the kitchen, and a lot there may not be as many people cook nowadays as they used to be, but I think there's still a lot of people that cook and like use their kitchen as a real central heart of the house.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 8:25

The number of times, how many times do you cook in fry food or scramble an egg or you let's say cooking ground beef and you get that splatter on the side that you you clean up the stove, but some of it goes on your floor. But how much of it do you turn your exhaust fan on to suck out as much as you can there? Exhaust fans don't get everything because sometimes people just don't remember to turn it on or things. So that actually goes into the air and then kind of sporadically goes into the house. Well, once it gets on the kitchen floor, as you walk through the kitchen to the rest of the house, you're tracking that cooking grease through the home. So all of the things that you do in a home will be tracked by your foot tracker through the home. So there's a lot of products that you don't are not even aware that you're tracking through your house. Body oils off your feet will leave spots on wood floorings and can do damage over time. Just the oils because you're not cleaning that oil off. The cooking grease attracts dirt, then it attracts, then you rub that in with your feet as you walk on it, acts as miniature sandpaper pieces. So all this professionally cleaning your home is important. A lot of people don't lean much into that because they think they can save money by doing it themselves, or it doesn't look that bad. But your flooring would go so much further in your investment if you just once a year, year and a half, maybe even two years for a hard surface. Hey, I just need you to come in, do a professional cleaning, and it will make it makes a huge difference in the longevity floor where you can make your floors last 50 years on a hard surface. It's just that maintaining it makes such a big difference. Like if you're doing hard surface, I have a machine that has a brush in the front and the back, and you put cleaner on the floor or in the machine, depending on how dirty it is. It drops it right in front of the brushes, the brushes scrub it, and then it sucks it right off the floor. So you're not overwetting the floor, but it's agitating that oils and those grease and all that dirt that's in the little grooves of your floor that your general mopping won't get out. So just that professional cleaning and having someone in your life that, hey, it's a year, year and a half, can you come by, clean my floors? And it's a lot cleaner, cheaper to clean your floors than to go through and re-sand a floor or refinish a floor. Maintaining it does cost, but it's a whole lot cheaper than replacing it and restoring.

Pets Stains And When To Switch

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Yeah, and you know, we're getting close to the time here, but if you could just, and I have so many questions for you. Maybe I can save this for another episode on the pets because us pet owners, I know you guys are big animal lovers. You know, we all continue to have pets.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

Pets are a huge part of the American family.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

Absolutely. And you know, we do, and it's just a, you know, there's gonna be an issue with the carpet, we get it professionally cleaned, but we can't, you know, maintain that all the time because it's expensive, and then you have to carve out the time, move the furniture, all that stuff. Um, but uh, I mean, in that case, you know, what do you do if you know your life is consistently gonna be like that? When's the time to replace it or to, you know, you can only get it professionally cleaned so many times before you wear it out, I imagine.

Financing Options And A Customer Story

SPEAKER_02 11:39

After the second or third time of dealing with pet stains, I would encourage a customer to say, hey, if you're really gonna put the money into this, replace your floor with at least a waterproof laminate or a luxury vinyl. Because to properly stain treat carpet for pet stains, you're pulling the carpet back, replacing the pad, sealing the subfloor. And you do that a couple times, it's just cheaper to replace your flooring. So, I mean, for us, we do offer financing for customers that goes for up to 10 years. That you can, if you want to put a nice hardwood flooring that's waterproof, you can do that, or you can go with a really nice luxury vinyl that is really durable and looks beautiful, or you can go something really inexpensive that's really durable, like a waterproof lamina. Any of those options would be better than going in and redoing your carpet all the time. I my English teacher really just my English teacher and my children's English teacher.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

Oh, that's awesome! That's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

So I'm I replaced her I replaced her carpet several years ago, and she had a lot of cats that she, her and her husband loved to take care of homeless cats that they adopt and take care of, but she had carpet in her bedroom and living space, and it just did long term it didn't work out to have carpet in those areas with taking care of the animals. So we replaced it with a beautiful entry-level luxury vinyl planking. And she told me at church the other night that all the smells are gone. She's able to keep it clean and she's real happy with it. She didn't spend a lot of money on the luxury vinyl, but it's a beautiful floor. But it's a whole lot healthier than having the carpet and having to continually have to clean it. She did say you can see the dust more, but that's going to be with any hard surface. You will see dust and it will look like you need to be cleaning more often than carpet because carpet hides dirt. That's one of the benefits of carpet. It hides dirt, it catches dirt. You vacuum it out and you professionally clean it, it'll stay looking good. Hard surface, you will see dirt. It will need to be cleaned more frequently because it just sits on the surface. But it is a much easier surface to clean long term.

SPEAKER_00 13:52

Well, I want to say thank you for sharing your expertise. Once again, Jason, we appreciate you.

Closing And Free Estimate

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Anytime. That's today's step in the right direction from the BPS Southeast Flooring Podcast. Ready to finally love what you're standing on? Call Jason for a free estimate at 828-532-2141 or visit bpssoutheast.com. Luxury vinyl, hardwood, carpet tile, flooring for everyone. Thanks for listening. And remember, great rooms don't just happen. They're in school.