Before starting on a full refinishing project, determine if your floors need to be completely sanded down to the bare wood or if the damage is shallow and mostly cosmetic. Deep scratches and gouges will require you to rough sand using a drum sander or belt sander, but small surface scratches or floors that have only lost their luster don’t need a complete overhaul. Instead, you can skip the rough sanding step and sand-screen the old finish with a buffer, removing only the top layer of polyurethane.

You can use dish soap mixed with warm water to clean just about any type of flooring, and while vinegar is a great addition to some floor cleaners, it’s not a good idea to use it on wood flooring or engineered wood flooring. Vinegar is very acidic, and it can gradually eat away at the protective finish on wood floors. If you’re cleaning laminate, tile, concrete, or vinyl floors, feel free to use vinegar and water in a 1-to-1 ratio with a few drops of dish soap. For wood floors, substitute the vinegar for olive oil.

Vinegar is an excellent cleaner for vinyl flooring and won’t ruin the material. Mopping the floor with a cup of vinegar diluted in a gallon of warm water can make it sparkle.

A floor polisher won’t remove scratches from a wood floor, but the polish can fill in surface scratches and make them all but invisible. If you run your fingernail gently over the scratch and it doesn’t catch, chances are that the polish will hide it. If it does catch, you might want to have your floors fully refinished, and you might need to have a professional floor sander in for particularly deep scratches. When in doubt, call a professional floor polisher to determine if polish will fill in your scratches or if you need more in-depth services.