OK I explain. It is a floating floor what we call in the UK engineered floor, so it is not solid throughout but a thickness of the wood mounted on a plywood base. It is a Malaysian wood, not so hard, so I suppose high heels could dent it perhaps, it is not the hardest. It is a click system not requiring glue, interesting. Now from Malaysia it says it has five factory coatings of which some contain aluminium oxide. It got worn out over the years. So a year ago I sanded the wood with the machines with the correct paper and vacuumed well. Then I applied one coat of Bona Traffic silk, you know the glossy one. I then noticed a number of parts were very coarse to the touch. So after some hours I sanded again with slightly finer paper but still coarse. Now I applied again Bona. Once again certain areas were coarse to the touch and you could see stains. So now I did a final very fine sanding but this was by hand with very fine paper particularly in the areas affected. It took me hours. Then I applied the third coat. I called the Bona representative who was at a loss!!! He gave me a bottle of Bona "refresh" it is a type of product to do another pass over. I applied it to the worse parts of the floor. Although one could see areas which were coarse to the touch and which did not look quite right the shine was sufficient to fool guests for Christmas. Now I am exactly one year on. In those area I mentioned there are now black marks. I attach some photos of the present situation with example of the black marks. (sorry I do not know how to create a new thread). I want to sand it and apply Bona again before New Year when my mother is visiting, my wife will just about tolerate me sanding on the 27th Dec. I had the suspicion it was the Bona product maybe the bottle I bought was old or had been exposed to low temperatures where I bought it from but the Bona representative told me it was very unlikely to be the case.

I didn't read the other responses so some of this might be repetetive, but here's my story: We use cloth diapers on DD who is now 3 months old. We use disposables for traveling but that is the only time we use them (a jumbo pack will last 4-6 weeks in this case). The only reason we don't travel with cloth is because they take up too much room in the diaper bag and are messier than I want to deal with. I bought all my diapers from organic bebe.com. (No, I don't work for them.) (I believe jardine diapers has a good website too - has lots of FAQ on cloth diapering. Type the name in a search engine. I've never ordered from them though.) After trial and error and several orders I've decided that 3 dozen diapers and about 5 wraps is a good amount to have on hand. This leaves you doing laundry every other day. We only use the prefolds because it's the cheapest and not any less convenient than all-in-ones or fitted diapers. Plus, I don't have a lot of space to store several different kinds of diapers. With the prefolds, I just stack them up and put them on a shelf. Works very easily. We have a wet pail and a dry pail. Basically a wet pail is a bucket of water that we keep in the bathroom that has a presoak in it (we use BIZ - look in the laundry aisle). Poopy diapers go in here. We also have a dry soak that lives by the crib. It is a diaper pail with a trash bag in it. Wet diapers go in here. We were just using a wet pail but it was filling up too fast and I wasn't sure wet diapers needed to really "soak" anyhow. Since DD only has a poopy diaper about once a day it's very convenient to have the dry pail so close to the crib! The wet pail lives in the bathroom so that you can dump the solids in the toilet before allowing the diapers to soak. When it's time to do a wash I dump all the diapers in the washer and run it on hot. We use dreft detergent on the cloth diapers but any detergent will do. (Somebody gave it to us and I thought we should make sure baby's bum isn't sensitive to Tide or other detergents. Plus, somebody said Dreft gets the diapers the whitest-don't know if that's true or not. When we run out of Dreft we'll probably use the family detergent. I use Tide on all her clothes as well as ours.) I do not dry the wraps in the dryer. I let them air dry. But, I do use the dryer for the prefolds. When buying prefolds you want to make sure they are good quality. Chinese prefolds and Baby textiles are supposedly the best but I go by their absorbancy chart. 4x8x4 is what I buy. That means there are 8 layers of absorbancy in the middle and 4 layers on each side. You can also buy diapers in 4x6x4 or 2x4x2 depending on how much absorbancy you want. I don't go any less than 4x8x4. I also don't use pins. What's great about prefolds is they will fit into a wrap very easily. Just fold into thirds, slip into a wrap, and slip under baby, velcro up. I like the Bummis Super Whisper wrap. (Look at the www.organicbebe.com diaper packages.) I had no idea what I was doing when I decided to use cloth diapers. I placed several posts similar to this one (Kara_PA is a lifesaver!!!) to get a general idea of where to start. Like you, I wanted to use them for financial reasons and because they're better for the environment. I hate seeing all those disposables going into the landfill. I guess this is how I'm doing my part to help. My folks used cloth diapers so I got a lot of help from them. They taught me about the presoak and how to diaper the baby. Things have changed since my brothers and I were babies, but the basics are still the same. Some people don't like cloth because the clothes fit bulkier. That is true, but it's not that bad. Besides, I figure if I'm taking DD anywhere that really matters she'll be in disposables anyhow! Who cares how their clothes look around the house! If you do decide to cloth diaper you will go through all kinds of trial and error and find a system that works for you. And, like me, your system might even change a little until you're comfortable with what you have. We had several fitted and all in one diapers on hand until I decided they weren't that much better and I couldn't justify the cost. An all-in-one Bumkins diaper costs about $11 (give or take). It will last about 6 months according to the manufacturer. You can buy disposables cheaper than that! So, I sold all of my all-in-ones and fitted diapers on ebay! Don't hesitate to ask more questions! Good luck to you!

Jane C., I would like to share my insight as an experienced (30 yrs.) woodworker. I work in a shop, not in the flooring trade or finishing, but we do a lot of projects that get prefinished and come back to our shop, for assembly and detailing, before going out for installation., hence my observations described later here. Unfortunately, there are many workers in the construction and home improvement trades, who are not very skilled, or experienced enough, to do a top-notch job. It seems the workers who did your flooring, would fit into this category. Not taping off painted woodwork is definitely unacceptable in my opinion, just a way to cut down time on the job. In your pic of the boot prints, it's hard to tell for sure without seeing it in person, but to my eyes, it looks like while the flooring was being installed, the workers had something on their shoes that left residue on the wood that reacted with the stain and/or clear coat. This would lead to my opinion, that these workers were not careful, and thorough, in their workmanship. Again, in my opinion, to acceptably spot-fix all those imperfections, would require someone very skilled and experienced at such things. In regards to the cracks and pits, I would have to say, with a high degree of certainty, that it is indeed from the wood shrinking. Any solid wood flooring, given a bit of time, is going to shrink a bit, under typical wintertime heating conditions where the air is dryer, hence the wood also dries out a bit. I would assume, when they came back to fix the poor finish job, the wood already shrunk a bit, and when new finish is applied, it doesn't "naturally" fill in all those small gaps. Finishes have a way of being repelled by cracks, rather than just flowing down in and filling it in, like one might think it would do. One must have a certain amount of acceptability, concerning these things- it's just the nature of wood and their finishes. Yes, those voids could be filled in with putty, but depending on the putty used, could still crack and eventually be sucked out with a vacuum, ( another coat of clear finish, after filling in all the cracks, would reduce the likeliness), but yes, it would make the voids less noticeable. I can't tell for sure if it's a glare in the pic, or if in the process of "fixing", they sanded some of the stain off, and now you ended up with noticeable light spots, If they DID sand through some of the stain, the only fix would be to strip, or sand off the WHOLE floor, and start over. Not sure how much success you'll have, trying to get a good quality fix/job out of these people. I know this may be of limited usefulness to you, but I just hoped to shed some light, from someone involved in the woodworking industry.

I'm a fan of Hickory. Love it! I love it's STRONG variation! Yep. Variation is the word that can be used for Hickory. If you are going for "mid-tone" then it means the Hickory is stained. No problem. That's fine. Hickory takes a stain very nicely. But it will still have plenty of variation. The stain will even that out a little bit, but not entirely. The finish is UV cured urethane. I'm not very excited about that finish. If you are going for factory finish, you will want to work with the TOUGHEST finishes on the market (that's why you go with factory finished...for the TOUGH finish). The UV cured urethane is a ho-hum type of finish. Average would be the best way to describe it. The thickness of the plank is 3/4" = normal for sold. The plank width is 5" with random lengths UPTO 60" (5ft). That tells me there will be many planks in the 3' - 4' range. Again, this is ho-hum average. And with a wide plank product, it will need "glue assist". And Hickory certainly needs it because it has a bit more movement (less stable) than white oak. And then there is the "low gloss" format. The low-gloss finish on this depth of colour = nightmare to live with. It will show dust, etc as well as oily foot prints, sock prints, paw prints and will look hazy at certain times during the day. The "haze" is part of the chemical make up of the finish itself = that's how they take away the gloss...they haze it with a chemical additive. The haze goes away when you sand and refinish the floor. That's the only way to fix it. If you must have a mid-tone floor, I would recommend a TOUGHER finish (aluminum oxide or ceramic infused polyurethane) in a satin. Satin is FAR MORE livable. It offers a lovely glow without being shiny. It hides skin oils (like paw prints from dogs) because it is the same gloss level as skin oils....it isn't hazy....you get the idea.