Easily Repair Chipped Laminate Flooring With TikTok's Brilliant Trick

Laminate flooring is a staple in many houses because it's low maintenance, easy to clean, and hard to damage. But that doesn't mean it's indestructible. While it can withstand a lot of daily wear and tear, chips and scuffs can still occur. And since it's made from laminate and not real wood, you can't sand down the plank and restain it to hide the damage. But that doesn't mean you have to live with the chip or hole permanently. Instead, you can use wax to fill in those unsightly marks. 

This floor-fixing hack will require some creative skills, so get your inner artist ready. Not only will you have to color match, wax, and feather, but you'll also need patience and a steady hand. But fear not; you can still pull this off even if you can't draw to save your life. It will just take a bit of trial and error. Here's how to do it. 

If you dropped something heavy on your floor and it resulted in a chip, then your first order of business is to clean out the hole. You can do so by either using a hose attachment to vacuum any dust or residue from the crack or using balled-up tape to lift it away. Then grab a wax resin repair kit, such as the Housoutil kit on Amazon, that clocks in at $23. It comes with multiple blocks of wax in differing wood colors, but make sure to buy one that matches your particular planks. Once you choose the best-matching hue, shave off a few pieces of wax with a box cutter and pat them into the chip.

Then use an electric soldering iron to melt the wax into the crack, taking special care to blend it into the plank around it. Working quickly, etch the wax into the plank's grooves, copying its texture and pattern. If you don't have a soldering iron handy, you can get one on Amazon for less than $20.

Lastly, use your box cutter to add some grooves into the wax, mimicking the ones already in the plank. Then take a crayon in the same color as those etchings and color in the ones you added. This will give it the same kind of dimension as the rest of the plank. Once the wax dries, add some furniture polish over the spot to seal it, and you're done.

Since you're using resin wax, the material should hold up well when you mop or vacuum the floor going forward. However, it might not fair well if you use a steam mop. In general, you shouldn't use a steam mop on laminate flooring anyway since humidity and moisture can damage it. The concentrated blasts of high heat can cause the flooring to lift, creating more trouble than good. However, some people still opt to use steam mops on the lowest setting, so if that's part of your weekly chore routine, you might want to avoid the plank you filled in with wax. The heat might warm the medium, altering the coloring and feathering. 

You also only want to use this hack on larger holes or chips. This might be too labor-intensive for smaller cracks or scratches, which can be filled with a wax crayon instead. You can use the crayon to simply color in the scratch, matching it to the plank color.