The Easiest Hardwood Floor Scratch Repair

If you have hardwood floors, you know how frustrating it is to see scratches marring their beauty.  After lots of trial and error, I have figured out the easiest hardwood floor scratch repair technique, and it doesn’t involve ANY sanding at all!

I can’t tell you how excited I am about this hardwood floor fix.  It may seem dumb, but I lived with unsightly white scratches on my hardwood floors for years before finding this solution.  It takes about 20 minutes and costs hardly anything to fix.  

Supplies Needed to Fix Scratched Hardwood Floors Without Sanding

This post contains affiliate links.  To read my full disclosure policy, please click here.

• DAP Wood Blend Sticks (get the color that matches your hardwood floors most closely.  There are packs for dark wood and light wood)
• Clean, dry, lint-free cloth (tip: I like to use cut up men’s undershirts for this)
• S.C. Johnson Paste Wax (if your floor is not finished with glossy poly or in an ultra-matte finish)

Hardwood Floor Scratch Repair with a Wax Stick

After replacing some furniture in my living room, scratches left on the floor from the old furniture were really starting to bother me.  There were large sections of white marks that stuck out like a sore thumb all over the place.

Then one day while digging through my utility drawer (aka the “who knows what’s in there drawer”), I found a pack of DAP Wood Blend Sticks.  I have no idea where these things came from.  I have no memory of buying them and neither does my husband.  But I digress.  Anyway, I decided to see if they would fix my scratched wood floors problem.

Step One: Rub the Wax Sticks on the Hardwood Scratches

I cleaned up the section of the floor where I needed to work, and then I started rubbing the wood blend sticks over the scratches – kind of like I was coloring on the floor.  (My three-year-old was watching me the whole time, and I just know that I’m going to find Crayola crayon drawings on the floor sometime soon.)  

I used several of the colors that came in the pack, since my floors vary in tone from place to place.  

Step Two: Buff off the Excess Wax

After I applied a lot of blend stick to the scratches, I let it sit for a couple of minutes.  Then I grabbed a lint-free cloth and got to work buffing the areas I’d colored.

I had to use a lot of elbow grease to get all of the excess wax stick off of the floor.  It was easy to tell when I’d removed all of the excess blend stick from the floor because the cloth moved over those spots easily and it no longer felt sticky to the touch.

The scratches looked much less pronounced after I’d done that, but it wasn’t totally perfect yet.

Step Three: Apply Paste Wax

I then grabbed the S.C. Johnson Paste Wax that I love to use on my furniture refinishing projects, and I applied a thin layer over the scratched areas.  

Once it had been on there for about twenty minutes, I buffed the excess off and was SO EXCITED to see that the scratches on my hardwood floors were virtually invisible now!  Everything blended together so nicely and the floor looked beautiful once again!  

Of course if you put your face right up to the scratches you can see them because there are still the scratch indentations there (I didn’t sand anything down after all), but to a person who isn’t checking the floor out with a microscope, they look beautiful once again.  

This little trick for fixing scratched hardwood floors without sanding has made a big difference in the look of my floors.  And it is so inexpensive (compared to refinishing!), and easy!  

If you have any hardwood floors that are in need of touching up, I recommend giving the DAP Blend Sticks and Paste Wax a try.  Remember to only use the Paste Wax if your floors have a finish of a subtle sheen (as opposed to gloss or matte).