Fixing The Floor From Hades

[Tim Daneliuk]

My kitchen has a so-called wood floor. I say "so-called" because it really is a prefinished hardwood verneer of perhaps 3/32" over some random piece of lumber.

The house is about 10 years old, and a couple of the floor planks are already in really rough shape with splits and tearouts in them - the Fine Homebuilder made sure they did the absolute minimum of everything.

I do have some spare pieces of this floor left over from construction. I'd like to drop them in to replace the worst of the worn spots. This leads me to the questions I hope the wreck geniuses can help with:

1) How do I get the existing bad pieces out? I'm guessing they are nailed on the toungue of the board and pressure fit on the groove side. Do I have to split the board in the center, and if so, how? How do I get the tongue side out?

2) Once I've cut the replacement pieces to length, I assume I have to shave of the tongues and just glue the replacement into place with epoxy or something. I'm a bit unclear on how to do this and still preserve the tongue of the adjacent "good" piece - I want it to stay nailed down. Ideas?

3) Will I have to run the replacement pieces through a thickness planer (planing the back side) to match the thickness of the worn boards or is 10 year board wear usually small enough that this ought not to be a problem.

Comments, suggestions, URLs, and offers to come do it for me for nothing (Chicago area) welcome...

Not-Looking-Forward-To-This-At-All-ly Yours,

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tim Daneliuk [e-mail] PGP Key:

[Doug Miller]

In article , [e-mail] wrote: Can't help you with 1 and 3, but I think I can with 2:

I believe the standard method of doing this is to cut the bottom off of the groove side, converting the groove into a rabbet, like so: _________________________ |_ |_ | _| |______________________|

Then slip the tongue into the groove of the board on the right, lower the rabbet over the tongue of the board to the left, and nail through the face of the replacement board.

[Highland Pairos]

I did this with my father on some solid floors but I think much of it will be similar.

1) Depending on the size of the pieces, a plunge cut in the middle of the width of the plank with a circular saw set to right about the thickness of the plank will give you a nice start on the first piece. Finish getting it out with chisels (don't use your good ones) and small prybars, hammers, etc. If there are multiple pieces to be removed adjacent to one another just keep working them out until they are all gone.

2) If there are multiple pieces adjacent to one another, the first pieces can go in as normal. It is when you get to the last piece that you have some work to do. You can either remove the bottom of the groove and then insert the tongue and lay it down, or remove the tongue, push the groove in place and then lay down the tongue side. If you do it that way, you may want to cut a bevel along the length of the bottom edge on the now removed tongue side. to secure it you can either face nail it with a finish nail and fill it, or as you mentioned use a strong adhesive of some kind. I don't know what would be best for that application.

3) The biggest PITA we ran into was the thickness issue. I didn't even think of it and therefore left my handplanes at home. I ended up using a scraper (not a card scraper), sander and a lot of sweat to get the thickness to match. If you have access to a thickness planer and that material will work in it, you might want to try it. Having said that it occurs to me that you say this is a veneer. If there has been any appreciable thinning of the existing floor, I can't imagine that the veneer would still be there.

Hope this helps,

SteveP.

[nospambob]