Any great ideas for rehabilitating scratched hardwood floors that won't break the bank?

I haven’t used them personally but I hear good things about wood stain markers. You might even want to re-stain the floors entirely. It won’t break the bank if you can do it yourself, but it’s a big project.

This is not a perfect way to rehabilitate an old wood floor, but it does a fairly good job. Pick a stain that is a bit darker than the present color of the floor. Stain the floor; leave the stain on for some time, checking the color periodically by rubbing the stain off of a small area. If it’s still too light, re-stain that area and check again later. The idea is to get the wood a bit darker, in an effort to make the whole floor match as best as possible. Since you have not sanded the old finish down to the bare wood, parts of the floor will take the stain differently. But sometimes this will be satisfactory. If you want to go to the huge trouble of sanding down the whole floor, you will probably get more conformity, but the job is horrendous!

One way or another, after you have re-stained the floor, and it is DRY, cover the stained floor with a polyurethane finish. More than one coat of polyurethane is better. Hope this works as well for you as it did twice for me!!

I’d start by renting one of those industrial grade buffers and use it to apply your basic wood floor polish. Worst case is you will wind up with a nice shiny clean floor that might still have a few scratches. OTOH, there is a good chance that a good polishing will cover the scratches you are concerned with.

Make them less noticable? Throw rugs do the trick for my floors.

I’ve refinished numerous hardwood floors over the past thirty years. The main thing to come to terms with is that the imperfections in a thirty year old floor is part of its charm. It will never look like a newly installed pergo floor or anything like that. Even a complete sanding refinish won’t make it look like a modern floor. It’s a decent amount of work to completely refinish too. And all that does is steal the charm away.

What I recommend for old floors is to first go through and make sure all planks are stable. Any creaks can be taken care of with a new flooring nail applied at the right spot. Then clean it with a mild soap to prepare for the final finish.

What you want is a good quality hardwood paste floor wax. Goes on thick and is best applied with an old style cloth mop. It will make the floor absolutely magnificent. It looks better than any new floor you could possibly install. It’s just stunning.

BWC has everything you need. If you want to hide or fill in scratches, then use the New England Brown Wax, assuming it’s not to dark for your floor. If you want to keep the original color, and just ad incredible shine, Clear Paste Bowling Alley Wax will do the best job. Very durable and long lasting. Don’t get a liquid… make sure it’s a paste. Renaissance works well too, and a little goes a long way.

If the scratches are really superficial, you might be surprised at how you can improve the look of your floor with a good washing with Murphy’s Oil Soap—I’ve also used Wood Preen before in rental apartments with some pretty rough looking floors that end up looking lovely. It doesn’t hide deep scratches but can really make an improvement. Maybe start with that, and then move on to some of the good scratch fillers mentioned above.