How Do You Look After a Parquet Floor?
Sweep or vacuum often, mop with a barely damp microfibre and a pH-neutral wood cleaner, wipe spills immediately, and keep the humidity in the house roughly between 40% and 60%. That last point is the one that matters most for parquet and the one almost nobody is told about — a parquet floor has far more joints per square metre than a plank floor, and every one of them opens and closes as the air changes.
The day-to-day routine is the same as any wood floor and is covered in our cleaning guide. What follows is what is different about parquet, and what a London house in particular does to it.
Why Parquet Behaves Differently
A plank floor is a few long boards running one way. A parquet floor is hundreds of short blocks laid in two or more directions. Two things follow from that.
First, the joints are everywhere. Where a plank floor has a seam every 180 mm or so, a herringbone floor has one every few centimetres, in both directions. Water that would run harmlessly across a plank floor finds an edge much sooner, which is why a spill left on parquet does more damage than the same spill on planks.
Second, the wood moves in two directions at once. Timber expands across the grain, not along it, and in herringbone half the blocks have their grain at right angles to the other half. As the air dries out, the floor does not simply shrink towards the walls; it works against itself. That is why gaps in parquet tend to appear as a scattering of fine lines across the room rather than as one wide gap at the skirting.
What a London Winter Does to It
A typical London house runs at 55–65% relative humidity in summer and drops to 30–35% once the heating goes on. That swing is what opens gaps between blocks in January and closes them again by May. It is normal, it is seasonal, and the mistake is to treat it as damage.
Do not fill winter gaps. Filler pushed into an open joint in February has nowhere to go when the floor swells in June, and the result is a lifted edge or a cracked block — a permanent fault created while fixing a temporary one. If the gaps bother you, the answer is a humidifier, not a filler gun.
A cheap hygrometer — the kind sold for wine or for houseplants — is the single most useful thing you can put in a room with a parquet floor. If it reads below 35% for weeks at a time, the floor is being dried out, and so is everything else wooden in the house.
The other London problem is the ground floor. Many Victorian and Edwardian houses have parquet laid straight onto a screed with no damp-proof membrane underneath, or one that has long since failed. Moisture rising through the slab lifts blocks from below, usually in one corner of a room first. If blocks are cupping or springing in a patch rather than across the whole floor, that is the cause and no amount of surface care will fix it.
Things That Ruin Parquet Faster Than Anything Else
| What happens | Instead | |
|---|---|---|
| Steam mop | Forces hot vapour into every joint at pressure; blocks lift and the finish clouds | Barely damp microfibre and a pH-neutral cleaner |
| Wet mopping | Water sits in the joints long enough to swell block edges | Wring the mop until it feels almost dry |
| Vinegar or bleach | Etches a lacquer permanently and strips an oiled finish | A cleaner made for wood, matched to the finish |
| A rug over a new floor | Blocks under it stay dark while the rest lightens or darkens | Move rugs occasionally for the first year |
| Pot plants on the floor | A slow leak nobody notices until the blocks are black | A waterproof tray, checked now and then |
| Radiator pipes | Tiny leaks run along a joint and spread | Check pipe collars once a year |
When It Needs Sanding
Parquet can be sanded, and an old one often looks extraordinary afterwards — but it is not the same job as sanding planks. Because the grain runs in several directions, the floor has to be worked diagonally and finished in stages, and the machine cannot be allowed to follow one direction across a joint. It is slower, it needs someone who has done it before, and a bad job on parquet is very visible: the pattern amplifies every mistake.
The other limit is thickness. Old solid blocks are usually 15–22 mm and can be sanded several times; modern engineered herringbone has a wear layer of a few millimetres and gets one or two. Before sanding an old floor it is worth lifting one block at a doorway to see what is actually there.
There are before-and-after photographs from a sanding job in Lewisham on our recent work page, and our installation and restoration page explains how we assess a floor.
Parquet Floors We Supply
We supply and fit parquet, herringbone and chevron across South East and South London. Herringbone starts at £25.99 per m² excluding VAT; across the whole engineered range of 130 floors, 82 are priced online between £25.99 and £83.99, median £47.99, and there are 11 floors on clearance from £36.49.
A whole ground floor of smoked oak herringbone we laid in Norwood gives an idea of how the pattern reads across several rooms. You can order three samples free, see full boards at the Forest Hill showroom, or send your measurements for a quote.