The birth of a Polyball.

Who has ever heard of a Polyball? We sure hadn't until Mid-April (a little over 2 months ago), about a week after our hardwood floors were refinished.

A little back story. We purchased our new (54 year old) house at the end of 2017 with the idea that we would move in sometime in the summer of 2018. We rented the home back to the sellers until March of 2018. We never expected the home WE were living in to be sold in three days and moving out for good a little over a month later.

We slowly began moving what we could from one house to the other in the time we had before moving EVERYTHING. Our new, ranch style, home has beautiful hardwood floors throughout, but they needed some sprucing up. We hired a hardwood floor contractor to refinish the floors before our move. Needless to say, life happens, and the project went from an estimate of two weeks, to three, then to four. Once the second coat of polyurethane went on the floors, we were cautioned to wait at least a week to get back on them and at least 30 days before putting anything flat on them, including rugs. We waited a week and then began to move some furniture back on the floors.

I noticed this behind the couch.

 Now...multiply that by 1000...2000...3000! They were everywhere! Our socks had wet, polyurethane balls stuck to them. The polyurethane was smearing on the floor and I felt as though I was on my hands and knees wiping up smears and polyballs 14 hours a day!

We googled this phenomenon and found it is a rare occurrence (of course!).

Here's the explanation from Wood Flooring Guy  and Mr. Floor - 1) The environmental conditions were not conducive to the drying of the polyurethane, so the polyurethane is seeping up through the cracks in the floor as the cracks diminish, causing polyballs, or polyurethane beads, to form. This generally happens when a NEW floor is installed in the winter when the heat is on and then rears it's ugly head in the spring time when the floor joints tend to tighten up. The polyurethane trapped within the spaces between the boards does not have the chance to dry properly and when the heat is turned off, the spaces tighten and the wet polyurethane is squeezed up to the surface. 2) The second coat of polyurethane is applied before the first cures, thereby causing the "wet" polyurethane to be trapped and push up through the cracks. So...which are we?

Not a new floor, not installed in the winter...hmmmmmm.  These sources conclude that it is difficult to charge the refinisher or determine what went wrong since this is such a rare occurrence. We did reach out to our floor re-finisher who expressed his concern and offered to assist with wiping up the polyballs. We decided not the push the issue because we DO NOT want to have our house torn apart for another month, dust all over the place and gagging on the strong odor!

What can we do about this? Sources say we can continue to wipe up polyballs until the polyurethane dries. Fast-forward 60+ days.  We are still scraping up polyballs but it seems they are dry, except when we find them under the beds or furniture. We are pretty sure those are stragglers that were missed from the early days.

We have not put any rugs down, but plan to have a test run over the next week (in an inconspicuous area in case the rug sticks and ruins part of the finish). This way the area could be repaired or hidden without too much effort.

What have we learned from this? SHIT STUFF happens. No, really, sometimes things happen that are not expected, and if we don't learn to roll with the punches, we are in BIG trouble. We also learned we need to be less concerned with being nice guys and instead look at these projects from a business standpoint. We got wrapped up in our contractor's personal problems because, of course, that's what nice people are supposed to do, and kept allowing him more time to complete the project. Now, that being said, we are okay with a few days or even a week past the due date, but two weeks was pushing it. Even then, he asked for more time because he felt "pressed for time" in getting the project finished. He did take some money off the final cost but I'm not sure it makes up for the two months of time I've missed of my earthly life spent wiping up polyballs.

For those of you thinking about having your hardwood floors refinished - BEWARE OF THE POLYBALL!

Kelli