Salvaged wood flooring question.

[Sipi]

I was able to get enough maple flooring from an old abandoned Victorian that was being torn down to cover the old hacked up floor in our kitchen and bedroom of our 1920 vernacular.

The salvaged floor in question was almost all warped cupped.
Is it possible to save it by running it through a planer taking off only about a thirty second or a sixteenth of an inch to remove the cupping? The underside of this floor is not kerfed.

Then pre varnish each board and then remove the old floor boards and plywood patches and lay it down like a pre finished floor.

Has anyone else here tried anything like this before?
Any information or advice on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Sipi

[lovesickest]

Hi Sipi.

I installed a reclaimed oak floor in my kitchen last year (as in reclaimed from an early 20rh c. building that had removed this floor and put the bundles out with the trash). My friend and I carefully picked them over inside, discarded any with broken grooves (more of an issue than a damaged tongue) and graded them with regards to color/finish. I used them with the existing finish as is. The less good pieces went under the fridge or where the table would be. We borrowed tools from the tool library, which included an angle nailer for floor installation, a chop saw, and oscillating saw - to trim under door trim so the boards could be slid under, and a brad nailer, since the angle floor nailer cannot reach around the first few starting rows.

There is a ton of info online with lots if how to videos. Installing reclaimed wood floors is exactly like installing a new tongue and groove floor. Make sure the sub floor is good, though to start. You also need to leave a small space for expansion around the perimeter.

Once they were installed, it looked like the floor was always there, which was exactly what I was after.

How warped or cupped are these boards ? The thickness above the tongue/groove is important. If it is too thin you cannot sand or refinish them.

Frankly - having to plane each board sounds like it is more trouble than it is worth. Obviously if the boards are 1" thick, yes, do it. If this is basic grade oak floor that has been refinished at least once with a scant 1/8" above the groove I think you won't get good results, from what I have read.

You also need more flooring than you think, as pieces need to be cut, and a few will get cracked during installation. After picking through and trimming we lost approximately 25 - 30% of the amount of boards. The building they came from was not a fancy place, so they were a pretty basic builder grade c. 1905 or so.

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[Mick_VT]

I would be inclined to fit it as as and then sand flat

[lovesickest]

Could you post a pic of how warped/cupped a typical board is ?

[oaktree]

I installed a reclaimed oak floor in my kitchen last year (as in reclaimed from an early 20rh c. building that had removed this floor and put the bundles out with the trash).

lovesickest, your kitchen is so amazing. I love the cupboards, paint colors, and floors! Are there more pictures anywhere?

[lovesickest]

Thanks, oaktree. I have PM'd you. Let me know if it doesn't make it ?

[Texas_Ranger]

I would be inclined to fit it as as and then sand flat

Me too, drum sander and off you go! OTOH really hard woods are a bear to sand even with 24 grit on a drum sander, the new old stock (but definitely piss-poor quality) solid beech in our sitting room took ages! Reclaimed is worse because wear (and previous refinishing) is never even so if you don't put back the boards in the exact same order you'll have considerably height differences. Not sure how well planing would work.

[phil]

I'd advise against pre-planing as well. You'll loose some of your thickness and if it's a 3/4" floor the only thickness you have before exposing the T and G is 1/3 of that if you go too thin you'll lose strength and you'll likely see some of them cracking, typically you'll see cracks where the top side of the groove broke away.

I'd lay the floor as is. buy lots of extra because there will be considerable waste.

when you are laying the boards you might be able to compensate by shimming in the odd spot here or there with a bit more tar paper.

any dirt , chipped wood etc on the underside would have to be looked after if you did thickness plane or it would take extra off where there was any sort of bump on the backside. You would still have to sand them to get rid of the planer marks. if you tried to just take a skin off you'd have unsatisfactory results.

Remember your new but 100 yr old flooring has a darkened brown "skin" near the finished surface. if that's sanded unevenly then it will be darker where the skin is darkened and where you cut deeper the skin of darkened wood will be missing and it will be as light as new wood. Let the drum sander do that part. plan on loosing 1 to 2 mm or the thickness of a dime or two. try not to go more if you don't need to. it's a trade off between removing all imperfections and leaving as much wood as you can.

the more even the boards are after laying the less wood you;ll loose. If one board sits one mm higher than the next then to get rid of the darkened skin on the lower board you will find yourself taking too much off the higher board. so do your best to lay it so they are as even as you can. if one board is supported by the tongue and not buy the floor than that's where it'll crack so pay attention to not only the hieght of the top but also to how well they are all sitting on the floor. you want the weight on the floor not the tongues. you can use a little puddle of PL glue if the shiplap underneath is uneven and not able to support parts of the flooring evenly. try keeping a scrap of thin tin handy and pushing it under as you go to get a feel for it.

when you buy used flooring make sure you look really closely at it, measure it take a caliper or micrometer. . If it's previously sanded you'll likely see some difference in thickness near the ends of the boards ( where they were near the wall) don't trust your senses here, measure it.

lots of what you will find available is previously sanded at least once. You can set the new nails low to avoid the drum sander as you are re-laying it but if it' gets too thin you;ll have issues with them cracking. In a perfect world you'd think the boards would all bear down evenly underneath but in reality there will be some spots where the T and G is actually supporting them and that's where you'll see them crack out afterwards.. if the original sufloor had a bump somewhere and then it was sanded after laying this board would then be thinner in this spot so you;ll likely see some differences in your reclaimed stock and your existing subfloor.

I wouldn't pre-plane your stock or you won't have enough meat to work with. If you tried to plane 1/16th off all your lumber you;d soon realize that due to the stock rolling and twisting and dirt or bumps etc that it wouldn't work as consistently as you first imagined. you;d probably have to first plane the backside and then the front side and then when you laid the floor you'd still have to sand to get them even and to get rid of the marks left by the planer.

Just lay the floor. lay tar paper first, try to keep height even. You can use a little PL glue here and there if you need to but don't use it to glue boards up that are cracked, use carpenters glue for that. .

keep checking for squareness as you go. I leave any crack alone if it is very thin. I do fill most of the larger cracks. Depending on humidity you need some room for expansion or contraction. Your new flooring will change size if it's going through a shift in humidity from where it was stored. - mostly across the grain. you don't want it so tight it might hump up if you do have a water spill at some point. if you choose to fill cracks do it after the initial drum sanding, then you can lay masking tape either side of any offending cracks. then fill the cracks with filler mixed the right color. If you really want to be fussy you can go and pick out all the paint and dirt from every crack. if you have white flecks of paint in the cracks that can look bad.. Your choice how many hours you wan to put in..

You can overfill the cracks slightly and pull the tape while the putty is still wet to compensate for shrinkage. when you do the final sanding it'll come flat. I usually knock the bulk off with a card scraper but it's not super necessary. some will tell you not to fill cracks, it depends on how much expansion you get, how big the other cracks are, how much the humidity changes, how wide your boards are and what species.. that old wood won't go back to it's original dimension but if it gets wet it'll expand so think about it and you can decide if you want to fill cracks. I like a nice floor that doesn't get hair and stuff caught in when I sweep but it depends on your final result. If it's the old rough pub sorta look you are going for you might not mind bigger cracks. wider boards need larger cracks as there is more movement per board. try to match the rest of your house. think about how humid the storage was and you might even want to wait for it to normalize if it's a huge difference. Wood never stops changing size but you won't notice that until you discover you have a problem.

if you want to increase your yield, then when you first get the used flooring home go through the stack and glue any cracked boards together before you loose the splinters. often if they fit good where they are split or cracked you can just work glue in and use masking tape to hold the pieces in place until dry. If the whole board is split you might have to clamp

newer floors have butt joints all over most of our old floors have much fewer. If you don't mind lots of joints you'll get more yield. try to spread them evenly. avoid making any joints that line up with adjacent boards. if you cut the ends of boards cut them just a hair out of square so that the top fits tightly. They will look better if you just take your chop saw off square by about 1 degree so the top is longer than the bottom by just a hair They will then butt together tight at the top surface.

once the floor is laid use the drum sander, practice with finer paper than you need to get the hang of it, never ever stop the drum sander with the drum still turning. not even once. it'll dig a rut , otherwise it's not a scary machine to use . you might need a 20 amp outlet. It's heavy to lift.

when you are done with the drum sander, rent the edger to do the edges. this is necessary because the drum sander won't go right up against the walls. then lastly rent the pad sander it will vibrate and you can push that machine all different ways and use finer paper on that. it's easy to handle. the one I rented has a backer that is like 1 inch of 3M material , like scrubbie pads you might use to do dishes It comes in different colors , white is fine, red is coarser the most abrasive is the black.

.. when you get close to done you can burnish the floor by removing the paper and just running the 3 M pad on the floor. be gentle on the floor, you don't want shoe prints in your final floor.

you can shop for paper somewhere other than the rental place to save money.

the edger rolls on two little steel wheels, watch out for it marking the floor as it can cause bruises that won't show until you get to finishing the floor , wrapping a little black tape around the wheels may help. adjusting how high these wheels are affects the angle of how the rotating disk meets the floor. I'd suggest just practicing on a piece of plywood before you start using it on the floor. wear knee pads with the edger, you have to walk sideways on your knees. with each machine you need to go through the grits so allow enough wood for that to happen. The coarser paper you start with the more passes you will make. You might start with 36 but it depends how cupped they are. practice with 100 on the machine to get the feel of it. , you'll do a better job if you do.

They do sell pre-finished flooring which is probably how you got the idea. with that you'd be working with stock that it is all perfectly flat and even and you;d have a plywood subflooor to work against. Most old houses have shiplap laid on a 45 degree bias which isn't as smooth as plywood like you'd see in a new build.

if you can take the baseboards out before you start it's best to. so you can get closer to the walls with the drum sander.
You decide what finish you want. I like to use danish oil so I can see things like bruises or shoe marks or marks from sanding or the wheels etc.. If I put oil first then I can catch the marks and sand a bit more until I am happy if I need to. it won't make you happy if you get everything done right but put your finish on only to discover you have shoe prints and things that were invisible until you applied a first coat of finish. Id wear socks or use some soft soled shoes that you never leave the room with until you are done. you want the floor immaculately clean before putting on your finish.

if you put poly first you wont' have a chance to do anything if you see marks , like a shoe mark or a sanding mark , you might have to live with it. the first coat will pop the grain and it will also amplify every imperfection.

. using a few coats of oil and no poly isn't a bad idea and some here like using shellac shellac isn't very hard wearing but it's easier to remove. I haven't used the water-base poly and wouldn't reccomend it myself because it stops the floor from darkening by blocking the UV so it doesn't age the same. Ive heard it's really hard to refinish from what I have heard you;d need to sand the WB stuff off to refinish and you can't afford the wood. Maybe others have had results refinishing it. You could find out more. if W/B interests you.

you can choose what you like. The commercial floor finishers love the water based as they live in and around it every day and it doesn't off gas like the other products. Oil based poly can be refinished with just a scuff sand. the easiest to refinish is oil , just clean the floor and then put more once in a while and you are good to go. another reason I like danish oil is because it soaks in and hardens under the surface and that combines with the topcoat. even still my floors are fir and the poly won't stop the dent from say a soup can being dropped. Oak is harder. Use what you like best but it's worth looking into the pros and cons of different finishes.

Phil

[Sipi]

Thank you everyone for your advice. We have had quite a bit of rain here recently. And the floor was soaked when I was removing it. After it has dried out for a few days in my garage most of the cupping seems to have gone out of it.

I've been carefully scraping the grime out of the surfaces between the boards. Is this stuff ever grimey and gritty. Most of the finish is gone and the boards are almost grey. There is about a quarter inch of material left over the tongue. It seems like I have plenty of mat'l left. It has been refinished before as I saw the evidence of this near the edges. It looks like the flooring was originally 1" thk. There were a lot of saw mills in this area back in the day.So it may have been made locally. I think the planing thing is kind of a bad idea. Everyone's advice made me think about it and realize the most sensible approach is to lay it down and finish it on the floor.

One last question as I'm considering how to lay this stuff down. The 2 rooms I'm using this in were an addition to the original one room workman's cottage which was built in 1920.
The addition was built in about 1935. And, the floor in the addition is about three quarters of an inch lower than the floor in the original house.

Without tearing out the bad floor, which is sound but, just patched and ugly. I wonder if I could just lay the good salvaged floor over the old? That would definitely solve my transition problem between the house and the addition.

By the way, Lovesickest your kitchen is beautiful. I love the colors and your floor turned out great. I can only hope mine turns out half as nice.

Thanks, Sipi

[phil]

I dont' see an issue with keeping the original floor in if it helps the transition. I'd just walk around and observe each board to see if it's springy or squeaky, you might face nail the odd spot or use a handful of screws.

now you mention the floor being patched and ugly , and you;d need some 1" material to work on it, that could be ok if you want to restore that floor you probably can. is it T and G flooring? are there plywod patches or places people cut through multiple boards with a circular saw?

if you wanted to replace one board in the middle of the floor, lets say someone drilled a hole for a pipe under the sink for example so you want ot replace a section.
- you can cut the flooring square by using a square piece of plywood and a router with a 1/4" square cut bit. set the router so it protrudes the thickness of you r flooring. lay the plywood down and see that it's square and kneel on it to keep it in place. plunge your router down and guide it against the plywood, cut to almost the edges of the board , don't overrun the cut. Use a chisel to clean up to the ends so you don't cut the adjacent boards.

- make a couple cuts with the circular saw along the grain and then you can pick out the pieces.
cut your new piece to fit. take the bottom of the tongue on your new board and snap it off. break it away save the piece.

- stick that broken piece under the tongue where it wants to fit. put some white glue along where you snapped it.
when you put the new piece in make sure the break you made lines up , when you set it down it's going to glue back together underneath. it should fit, get rid of any splinters if they stop it from fitting well. make sure it can sit down flat with a trial fit before you put glue on it.

- put some PL glue on the bottom of that new board. hook the new board into the tongue of the flooring that's there. If you find you need to round off the bottom edge or trim a bit of wood that's ok just keep the face intact.
press it down and face nail it with some finishing nails, set the nails. you can fill the little holes later.

There ...youre done replacing a board in the middle of the floor

If you have places where they have made saw cuts across the boards then you might need to replace larger sections. you want any boards that meet end to end to not meet in the same place or too close to each other.

you can use a similar technique as above. in some cases you may be sliding the new board in amongst the old boards, it will bend a little, you may need to trim some of the tongue or groove off , Just use PL glue to replace any missing wood so you don't have voids. You probably get the idea at this point.. really my point was that you can replace any board you want to in that floor without taking the whole floor apart. there's one gotcha you can't slip boards in if you have a wall in the way so you have to think about how to approach that if it's a problem.

I had several places where they had sheets of plywood, some flooring that didn't match and that section ended all in the same spot and that flooring was different. I had a big square vent in my hallway that had been boarded over with tile on top. various holes from an older kitchen. nails everywhere that had blackened. I replaced whatever needed and each time I fitted all my replacement boards and then sanded the whole floor to make it even. I was able to get boards that match well, don't worry about if it looks grey that will sand off.

if it got really wet for a long time wod takes about a year per inch to dry but if you just put it in the rain for a day that's different , it won't have really soaked through in a day. if it was wet a long time it might take longer and they will shrink and stretch across the width of the board, not so much lengthwise. If it's too wet when you install it then your gaps wil be larger. you can fill some of the larger gaps if you want or some don't like to. in some places I made little wedges and glued them in to fill cracks if I needed to and didn't want too much filler.
if you use filler you can get the powdered pigments so you can match the color. you need to aim for the finished color of the floor WITH the finish on , so it might be worth some experiments to get the color right.
areas where there is too much filler look bad. try to keep the filler off the wood anywhere you don't really need it.

Use masking tape to isolate where you want the filler. If you have nail holes try punching a hole in a piece of tape and you can put that over the hole , fill it and pull the tape off right away, that way you won't make a nail hole look like a 1/4" diameter blob of putty. just make the hole in the tape the size of the nail hole. keep the surface area of the filler as minimal as possible, the odd little dent is ok, leave it. call that patina

before you rent a sander, check the floor. any nail near the surface needs to be driven down. You dont' want he rental sitting there while you do this. so check that first.

when replacing sections make sure they aren't any lower than the existing so when you sand you can make it even, you mostly just dont; want hollows or you'll have to sand too much. shim with tar paper if you need to, to get it pretty even.
I just rented the three machines from home depot, Ive gone through this process 4 times with different areas and I have one or two more to do.
allow a day for each machine. buy knee pads you'll need them. its lots of kneeling. that last machine you might do on a 1/2 day rental. here they had a card that if you rent five machines you get one rental free so if they offer that get the card and you'll be most of the way there.

not sure what kind of flooring you have. mine is fir, if it's fir you might see a lot of black marks near iron nails, that's a reaction with the tannins in the wood. and it's possible to use wood bleach to lighten the marks if you need to, I could explain. you'll need oxalic acid if you do that, its also called wood bleach. I think this also happens with oak. but some other woods might not have the tannins that react that way. in the kitchen I had a lot of black marks all over the floor and I needed to wood bleach the floor and then darken it back to match the surrounding. it looks pretty nice now and it matches well. Household bleach is not the same thing as oxalic acid.

let us know how you do , you are on the right track. cleaning the grooves and repairing your replacement flooring now is time well spent. I just wanted to point out you do have a choice if you like the original floor it's surprising what you can fix. when you sand it all it will look beautiful again. what really ends the life of the flooring is sanding and exposing the nails. but you might refinish a floor two or three times if you are able to go light on the sanding. cupped boards will cause you to want ot sand deeper so if they can dry and flatten before you sand that's best.

after sanding the fir darkens quite a bit from the sun it takes time but in the first year itll darken quite a bit , different woods will darken differently. if you put rugs down make a point of moving them around , they make shadows so if you move them you won't see shadow lines from the rugs.

if you decide to lay a new floor over the old you might think about running it perpendicular to the way the old one was. you could even get fancy and do angles and stuff if you wanted or inlay to make it fancy.

Phil