So our house is almost 100 years old. My wife and I love hardwood and we have it throughout the house. The floors need refinished as the previous owners didn’t take great care of them. There are a couple of areas that are of concern to me, because some gaps have developed over the years. Here is a picture of said gaps:
My question is, what is the best way to repair these? I was thinking for gaps that run the length of two boards, I could cut out the old board, rip the bottom of the grove off of a new board, then slide the new board into place and maybe face nail it, set and putty. For gaps like the ones shown in the second picture, I would have to do something similar, only replace a lot more because some of the gaps are in the middle of the floor, so I would have to take the whole row out and reset it.
I’m hoping someone will say that I can just putty everything and be done with it, but I don’t think that is going to happen =) We will be putting a dark stain on though, and the gaps are in the 1/16" to 1/8" range.
Let me know what the best way of tackling this will be. I want to refinish at least the upstairs this spring, so I should start repairing in the next couple of weeks. My father-in-law has a good amount of oak hardwood that he said we could have so I really want to keep it real wood. Not very interested in replacing everything if it can be helped.
im no where able to tell you what or how to finish the floors. my girlfriend works at taylor rentle on curry hollow road in pleasant hills. they might beable to help you. ill have her hook you up with the tools for lil discount
I re-did some of our hardwood floors, since variations in temperature and humidity cause the wood to expand and contract, small gaps and cracks do serve a purpose. Winter months tend to be drier making cracks and gaps more visible. In summer, humidity rises, causing some cracks to virtually disappear. Large cracks in the summer however, only lead to bigger cracks in the winter. You can fill the gaps at the ends of the floor planks because wood doesn’t expand very much lengthwise and make sure to fill them before you sand.
Unfortunately, using filler is your only real solution. It comes in different colors to match your current floor, or the desired wood look. Since you are going to stain it obviously match that color. I don’t think you want to stain it too dark, all the one’s that I’ve seen with dark stain always don’t turn out as appealing to the eye. Here is a nice tutorial on how to refinish floors: http://www.maro.net/index.php?itemid=114
I will be doing this as soon as it gets a little warmer Chris. If you want to stop over and take a look, I already finished the downstairs of my house this summer and it turned out well. BTW-don’t use a belt sander if the wood isn’t super bad, it takes off way too much.
sounds good val! I was going to use a palm sander for the edges, drum for the main part of the floors. I have to do the steps too, and the treads are a little rougher, so I think I’m going to hit them with a medium grit belt on my belt sander, and just go cautiously.
For the polyurethane to dry it should be warmer out, the only reason I am waiting to do this. Usually, it dries within 3-5hrs, but when it’s cold it takes much longer and you don’t want this to be a 3 week finishing project, not counting the sanding etc.
yep, same here, but I’m going to start prepping now, like removing 1/4 round trim and fixing any areas that I can. Figure I’ll prep the whole house, then I just have sanding / finishing. Probably start sanding stuff in april sometime.
I just did a lot of that this weekend, pulled up carpet and what not. It’s tough to get motivated sometimes, but in these winter months when you don’t really want to go outside (excluding today/tomorrow) it’s easy to get motivated, especially after the steelers loss
did mine during the winter months last year, did about 5 coats of the water-based polyurethane in one day, the water-based poly drys super quik compaired to the oil-based stuff, the thing with the water based is you should recoat about once a year. Using water-based makes it so much easier, and like I said I used it in the winter and it dried quick. I also rented a drum sander from home depot, yes it takes a decent amount off if you use real aggressive pads, but if your floors are really uneven its the better way to go, with the orbital ones you use a crap load of pads and it takes longer, also the edger from home depot kinda sucks. Only problem with my floors is the previous owners decided to drive an assload of nails into it, I wasn’t about to care enough to fill them all, esp. after having to use a hole punch and punch each nail a decent amount into the wood before sanding…
i just re-did our floors this past summer using the home depot random orbital. used oil based polyurethane to finish (didn’t have much luck with the water based stuff). results came out very nicely.
