Patching A Hardwood Floor, Part 2

Preparing the new wood was labor intensive, but at least there was no chance I would change things for the worse in my house. Once I moved to the ‘removal and replacement’ step, that became a very real possibility. With any DIY project, you run the risk of screwing everything up even worse and paying someone else to fix the original problem and your additional mistakes. Knowing that, I was determined to get this one right. Before I could start working with my new wood slats, I had to remove every piece of wood that made up the old vent hole.

You may be wondering how you remove a wood slat from a floor that’s tied into the other pieces with tongue and groove and fastened to the subfloor with nails. The answer is, you do it very carefully.

Set your circular saw to be just barely deeper that the depth of the hardwood slats. You have to cut two parallel lines down the center of the slat and stop the saw just as the blade reaches the joint. Buy a new blade for this process and understand that you’ll slowly ruin it as you inevitably encounter and cut through nails, throwing hot sparks all over the place. Don’t worry about your walls and floor; the sparks only burn your skin (I didn’t realize how warped that rationalization was until I wrote it).

Once you’ve cut the parallel lines in your slat, you can lift and remove the center piece. Now that there’s a channel, you have room to wiggle the tongue side and groove side away from their adjacent pieces and remove them as well.

It’s a tedious process, but it’s not really that difficult. What’s difficult is removing the random nails that remain. (If you were trying to remove a piece of wood from the middle of a floor, you would use this same process, but you’d start by drilling a one inch hole in the middle of the slat and starting your saw cuts from there).

It’s less important that you cut all of the pieces completely, and more important that you stagger the ends. Some of my slats went deep into the bedrooms, so it made more sense to cut them off close to the old vent than to remove the whole pieces. Hence the staggered, almost stair-stepped ends.

Once all of the pieces were cut, I started laying the new slats into the existing holes. To my chagrin, I discovered that the new slats were not quite as thick as the replacements. This was preferable to the new ones being too thick, as I don’t own a planer, but it was a problem nonetheless. The margin was so small (about the thickness of a penny in most cases) that I couldn’t cut shims. The wood just disintegrated. To make matters worse, my subfloor is made up of wooden beams instead of plywood sheets. Some beams were higher than others, making my task even more complex. In some areas, I didn’t need any shims at all. In others, there was a sizable gap.

After a lot of thought, I decided there was only one way to adjust and control the height of the new slats as the subfloor constantly changed depths. My solution gives new meaning to the phrase, putting money into your house.

With wood glue and about three dollars worth of pennies (stacked two or three high in some places), the wife and I were able to cut and lay the new slats flush with the existing floor.

We knew we were almost finished when the only word left was “PROGRESS.”

Because the new slats don’t tie into the existing floor, I had to secure them individually. And since they weren’t flush with the subfloor, I couldn’t glue them (they were, however, glued to the pennies which were glued to the floor). I pre-drilled and inserted trim head screws along the slats to tie them down. I was careful to counter-sink them enough so that they won’t interfere if a future owner decides to refinish the floors.

This step was very rewarding. The next step is to fill the screw holes, sand the filler flush, and restore the wood to match the existing floor as best I can. I know it’ll always look like a patch until someone refinishes the floors in the whole house, but I’m hoping I can get it pretty close.

UPDATE: Patching A Hardwood Floor, Part 3

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