What I knew right from the beginning:
- someone had put down thin particle board and two layers of PVC down on top of the old floor using lots of screws
- the floor boards we had came from at least 2 different rooms
- the workers who ripped the floor out were quite brutal
- some of the wood was in rather rough shape, the soft parts of the wood grain worn away
A few years later I wanted to use the flooring in our hallway, so I took a few boardds, put them together, sanded and oiled them. The result was rather nice, but in the end we re-installed the original hallway floor rather than changing the design radically.
Last year I wanted to use the floor in our farmhouse renovation.
First we had to clean it up. There were old nails in the grooves, the screws from the pressboard and lots of dirt. Apparently when installed the floors had HUGE gaps were dirt collected and solidified over the years. I had to scrape all that gunk off the tongues and out of the grooves. During cleanup and sorting I realised a few more things.
- there were 4 different kinds of boards, 3 and 3 1/2" wide and slightly worn / extremely worn
- we had much fewer boards than I'd originally anticipated
- some boards were unusable, either worn down almost all the way to the tongues and grooves or rotted
Here you can see some of the screws and how badly worn some of the boards were
We still tried to install the floor, but gave up after a few courses because we got too far away from straight and the hard wood was a bear to nail. Instead, we put down new larch planks. The next time we saw the new floor it had expanded a LOT and buckled, so we had to take it out again. Instead of re-installing the new floor, I decided to give the old oak one last chance, using screws rather than nails this time. Slowly but surely it worked.
Some boards were cracked and I needed to devise creative ways of fixing them. Repairing a split mid-length above the groove:
FInished floor, before sanding:
After sanding the living daylight out of the floor (the height differences were incredible, and some boards were deeply worn and stained, so we needed to remove a lot of wood):
Freshly oiled:
You can see that even after really aggressive sanding those boards have loads of character!
