laying salvaged wood floors

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Hi I have lots of salvaged maple flooring. When it was ripped up a lot of the tongue and groove got trashed. I have been told that I can match good tongues to mashed grooves and lay it (or the other way around.) Is this okay? Or do I have to try and cut out all the damaged parts? It's beautiful wood, I just don't know how to use it most efficiently.

Thanks in advance for any help with this!

-- Ann Zavala (AnnZavala@Yahoo.com), June 18, 2000

Answers

Ann, we have used salvaged T&G flooring with busted up tongues before, but nothing as nice as maple! One thought might be put a lot of glue on the subfloor first and then snug the tongueless boards up tight. Instead of toenailing the boards, you could nail straight down. Then you could countersink the nails and use a tiny bit of putty to cover. We've never done this, but it might work. The important part would be to secure the floor well, so it's level. This might prevent you having to sand all over again next year as any two boards might move vertically relative to each other. (And you don't want to trip on them!)Good luck!

-- sheepish (rborgo@gte.net), June 18, 2000.

Ann, it is hard to know just how trashed "trashed" is. Select for the best pieces you can. On the grooved side, if the lip is gone on one edge, flip that board so you always have a good lip on top. Try and scatter the damaged pieces around as much as possible.

If the tongues are damaged, it isn't as much of a problem, just time consuming to fix. Rout the tongue into a groove and rip lenghts of thin lumber to fit the new grooves-use the hopeless pieces of flooring for the new tongues. Glue in with a carpenter's glue.

With time and care, you might be able to glue some of the pieces with lesser amounts of damage back together. You might be able to "unmash" some of the bad spots by carefully steaming with a steam iron. Don't put the iron on the wood, just hold it over the wood. This can cause some other problems, like raising the grain, so practice on scraps first to see how to do it and if it will work for you.

You might be able to find someone who can cut new tongues and grooves for you. You'll end up with narrower flooring of course. Another idea would be to rehab the existing grooves, turn the existing tongues into grooves, and then use a contrasting wood cut with tongues on both sides for a striped floor. It would take a lot of calculations to get it to come out right.

If the damage is fairly localized to one end of the flooring, the simpliest method would be just to shorten all the pieces. If you can only get very short undamaged pieces out of the flooring you have, consider something like a herringbone pattern. Check some up-scale home dec books out at your library, and also see what they have for books with how-to instructions for laying wood floors for some ideas. Gerbil

-- Gerbil (ima_gerbil@hotmail.com), June 18, 2000.


On my wood floor, 1x12 pine planks, I drilled holes in the wood about 1/4" deep, used wood screws to fasten the planks to the floor, and then used plugs that I cut with a plug cutter (less than 3$)from scrap 'end pieces'. Glued the plugs in, cut flush with rest of flooring, then sanded.

Another alternative is to use 'strategic placement' of your 'good' and 'bad' pieces. Use the rough pieces where you know you'll always have a couch or chair or rug. Areas that'll always be visible, try to use your good 'show' pieces.

-- phil briggs (phillipbriggs@thenett.com), June 18, 2000.


Personally, I'd use a combination of Sheepishes idea of glue and fastening from the top and Phils idea of countersinking, construction screwing and plugging the holes. The big advantage of using screws in this way with glue between the subfloor and the "new" floor is you can be assured the new flooring will be very secure to the subfloor and screws make tweaking a little simpler. Gerbils method is very good but alot of work and pretty time consuming I'd think.

-- john leake (natlivent@pcpros.net), June 18, 2000.

Thanks everyone for the ideas. We're planing the wood a couple of times right now to get all the varnish and paint off the wood - oh it is beautiful! Lots of tigering and eyes and the surface is fine. I'm just going to polyurethane it and let the beauty show through. I think I will be using the Senco nailer that I have with the slat tip. That was developed especially for hardwood floors. In addition, that idea of using screws to tighten everything down together sounds like just the thing. I don't know why I didn't think of it, since we laid a 2x6 tongue and groove pine decking floor that came out spectacularly beautiful, with screws and those little fake wood round tops sunk into the surface - can't think of the name of those things .

On to the next adventure! Thanks again Ann

-- Ann Zavala (AnnZavala@Yahoo.com), June 21, 2000.



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