Wood Floor Repair
Hardwood floors can get messed up in so many ways and despite the fact that most of them come with a “should last 40 years” sticker next to them, they rarely get the chance to light so many candles on the cake, mainly because a lot of external factors intervene in the health of your flooring. Sure, if your house would be a perfectly void environment where people rarely use the floor, keeping your current hardwood floor for 40 years wouldn’t be a problem, but seeing how you’ll most likely be moving furniture, walking all over the place, dropping stuff on the floor and the likes, bad stuff will happen to your hardwood floor.
If you’re tired of floor coverings and want to restore the natural warmth and beauty of hardwood under the carpet, the job is difficult, but it can be done. Replacing your floor complete is often not the best way to work around the problem, either because it’s expensive, too much work and discomfort, or simply because it’s unreasonable.
Even if you have money pouring from a faucet in the wall, you probably still wouldn’t replace your 1 year old hardwood floor just because you dropped something on it and it left a few scratches. This is when learning how to repair hardwood floors really starts paying off. You will have to remove the old finish and strip the floor down to the bare wood. Only then can you apply the new finish.
Restoring hardwood floors can be easy if you make it so, but don’t think everything will run smooth from your first tries. This is a task that’s often best left to a professional. You can probably work your way through the job, but a professional will probably be able to complete the task and be on the road to the next job while you are still futzing around with the wood chisel.
Different hardwood flooring professionals may have different techniques for removing a single floorboard, but just about any pro will start by carefully removing the center one-third or so of the damaged floorboard.
Before you begin, make sure you know a supplier of this same size and species of wood floor. Take a sample to your hardwood floor supplier that caters to tradesmen. The salesmen in some floor boutiques have limited knowledge, so you’ll have to find a hardwood floor specialty shop. Or a carpentry-cabinet making shop that is willing to do a small run of boards, if they turn out to be an odd size or species.
If you are repairing a prefinished floor, go to the dealer of that brand, in your area. If you don’t know the brand, look on the back of the board, it will sometimes be stamped there. Hopefully they will have the same size and color available in small quantities if this is a minor fix up of a few boards. You may find that the minimum order is about 20sq. ft. for most prefinished floors, nested in a box.
But if manufacturers have changed their stain colors just a little or stain have been discontinued or the company is now out of business, it may have a dramatic negative effect on the blending in of your repair. The solution in some of these cases is to repair the floor with unfinished wood, then sand and refinish the whole floor. But the wise homeowner will have saved a box or two of the original material, and of course this will look much the same as the rest of the floor.
The only difference may be a lightening of a dyed stained floor (dye stains are not very colorfast, pigment stained wood is better). Or a darkening of the finish or in a case of American Cherry, a darkening of the original wood itself, when exposed to sunlight. In all these cases it’s best to do the repair anyway, and let time age the new patch.
Before you start, move everything out of the room. This includes curtains and draperies, pictures — everything. Floor refinishing is messy, especially during the sanding operation. Be sure to wear a safety mask and safety glasses to keep finish and wood particles from eyes and lungs during this process.
The matter with repairing hardwood floors is that you do not have a magic formula to set up all troubles. Each of the problems that may happen with your floor need to be tackled differently and mostly, using a specific hardwood floor repair method. For example:
- Scratches – Hardwood floor scratches are inevitable. At some point, scratches will happen. If you have hardwood flooring, it’s important that you learn how to do simple scratch repairs yourself. However, before you start fixing any scratches, you’ll need to learn how to differentiate between scratches and gouges on your hardwood floor. Between scratches and gouges, scratches on hardwood floors are much more common.
It’s near impossible to keep hardwood floors from getting scratches. A scratch is typically a visible, but not deep, marking on your hardwood floor’s surface. Hardwood floor scratches can be caused by dragging furniture across the floor or by glass that has fallen and cut the surface of the floor. Again, scratches are nearly impossible to avoid, so the best thing you can do is learn how to deal with the scratches, like learning how to do simple scratch repairs.
It’s pretty simple; you don’t have to hire a professional to do it for you. Smaller scratches are easy to cope with and you can use a simple color putty stick to handle them. Just clean the scratches thoroughly, apply the stick over the damage and you’re done. Another way, takes a fine paintbrush, dip it in the finish originally used on the floor and brush it across the scratched area. Wipe with a soft cloth.
Be careful and gentle when you brush in the finish onto the scratch. Too much or too little and the area will look much different from the rest of the hardwood floor. Brush in just enough finish so that it looks almost the same as the rest.
- Gouges – A gouge, however, is much deeper than a scratch. Think of a gouge as a “flesh wound” a hardwood floor could sustain. Gouges are essentially scratches that went the extra mile. A gouge won’t be covered up by the magical putty stick and you’ll need some wood filler that matches your floor’s color.
- Gaps – gaps usually form after a while, when the hardwood floor’s panels drift apart slightly. Gaps can be tightened down using a special tool, but usually they tend to be overlooked unless they’re really a problem (for example when you can fit a dime between your panels, you know you have a problem). A typical scenario is a 30 – 40 year-old floor with gaps, creaks, and movement throughout. Filling this sort of floor with wood floor filler will probably result in the filler coming out and the flooring will look worse than it did in the beginning.
Stopping the movement is necessary for good performance of a repair that demands filling and using a new surface finish. To stop the movement, first decide which edge of the board moves most and face nail along that edge. If both adjoins move, alternately nail along each edge. Use a flooring cleat, trim screw, or 7d-galvanized casing nail – dimpled head flooring nail- threaded flooring screw nail. Pre-drill pilot holes when applying the larger nails or screws.
Choose the open grain of the boards to better hide the nail when filled. An air-operated finish stick nailer won’t hold the flooring as firmly as the others. Face nailing every 10” to 12” may be essential to assure the flooring.
- Buckling planks – Occasionally, a hardwood floorboard buckles, due to humidity levels. When this happens, you need to fix it fast for two reasons; to avoid further damage to the floor and more important, to get rid of a real tripping hazard. Gaps form because wood shrinks when it dries out, but when it gets in touch with water, it expands.
- So if you live in a humid area or if you drop water on the floor, your hardwood planks will buckle up creating discomfort and possibly a dangerous trap in the floor. You can work around this problem by applying a weight over the buckled area for a couple of days. To fix a buckled floorboard, you need to be able to access the floor from below.
The way to tackle this problem is to put weight on the buckled area from above – a cement block works well. Then install a 1-1/4- inch screw in the buckled flooring from below. Allow the screw to penetrate only halfway into the flooring, or it may come up through the finished surface. Driving the screw through the subfloor and into the flooring pulls the flooring down against the subfloor and gets rid of the buckled spot.
Hardwood flooring is installed from side of the room to the other interlocking each other with tongue and groove edges. It’s hard to remove one piece in the middle of the floor when the whole floor is attached to that piece. Great care is needed when you begin to remove a piece of hardwood floor. A problem with your hardwood floors doesn’t mean that you have to replace or refinish the entire floor.
Replace a strip of flooring, fix a buckled board, or remove stains and scratches, and do it all yourself. Your hardwood floor may be in generally fine shape, with just a damaged spot or two. If you find damage or stains, it may be easier and more effective to make small repairs than to refinish the entire floor. Don’t feel compelled to hire someone to make minor repairs.
Do it yourself and save some money for bigger projects. Start be masking off the area surrounding the damaged area with blue painters tape and a drop cloth. This will stop you from accidentally destroying other parts of the floor from tools and debris. Then do these steps.
o Using a carpenter’s square, mark an orthogonal line across the section of the board to be removed. If you are removing the entire strip, skip this step.
o Bore-holes along the marks by using a 1/2- or 3/8-inch-diameter spade bit and power drill.
o Using a wood chisel, part the damaged board into two pieces. It will make removal easier.
o Pry out the damaged board. If you take a strip out of the middle, you are able to pry the remaining pieces away from the adjoining boards before prying them up. Remove any extra boards the same way but cut them so the end joints are staggered.
o Square up the drilled ends with a very sharp wood chisel, and use a nail puller to take away any exposed nails or drive them in out of the way with a nail set. You want the ends of the good sections smooth and square for lighter installation.
o Cut a replacing strip to the same length as the one you removed. As required, cut the bottom side of the groove on the board. Removing the bottom groove enables you to install a board between two others by inserting its tongue side first and then depressing its groove side into place. If you do not remove it, you won’t be able to get the board past the tongue of the adjoining board.
o Test-fit the strip to make certain that it fits. If it does not, recut the plank.
o Take out the replacement strip and apply construction adhesive to the backside of the strip.
o Install the strip and softly tap it into place. Apply a scrap piece of wood to protect the strip’s surface while tapping it into place.
o Nail the board with 2-inch-long ring-shank flooring nails and drive the heads just below the surface with a nail set.
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