Restoring Old Wood Floors

I am always awed by the craftsmanship that is used in some old wood floors I have encountered. One such job was in an old Victorian home in Cobleskill, NY . This house was undergoing major renovation and I was doing all the floor work. Each room seemed to be a unique work of art in itself. A different design in each room made this an very interesting home.

One room had one whole corner missing. The design was squares made up of 12 small pieces cut on the diagonal of the square with a oak and mahogany border around the perimeter. There was some extensive damage to the sub-floor as well.

This kind of work is often like Pandora's box. I never know what I am getting into until I actually start taking things apart and evaluating the damage..

I first removed flooring that had to be replaced. Much of the flooring was missing all together and I need to envision what the missing pieces looked like from the pieces I had. I also had to be careful not to disturb or worse.....break some of the flooring that was OK. This is painstaking work sometimes especially because of the age of the wood.

Once I had the flooring removed I needed to remove the rotten pieces of sub-floor. As often happens I find that there is nothing to nail the new sub-floor to so I need to get creative and make some structural support

Once i have the structural support in place I replace the sub-floor with solid wood. Often this wood is from my collection of wood at the shop. Rarely do I use new wood but it is always solid. I like to overbuild anything I work on.

Adding the flooring was a little challenging because of the size of the pieces involved and the angles.

Past experience has taught me that cutting small pieces on a power miter saw is dangerous to both me and the wood. More than once I have had small pieces shatter and take off like a bullet if the saw blade catches them just wrong. I also don't like getting my fingers that close to the blade. Having these angles made the closeness to the blade even more of an issue.

I have found that a power scroll saw works well for small detailed pieces of wood floor repair. This saw is the kind used to make jigsaw puzzles. It has a table and the blade is about six inches long and moves up and down in a sewing machine type motion. The teeth are much finer and the blade pulls the wood into the table which reduces the possibility of breakage tremendously.

This also allows me to hold the work more securely. As I was doing this repair I occasionally thought of the craftsmen who did the original floors without any power tools.

One of the secrets of this kind of work is knowing that you might have to cut one piece two, three or more times just to get it right. Even so I sometimes need to take a break and often times when I do that i make the perfect piece on the next try..

I found some old wood for this repair which matched the species and age of the original floor., The Honduras mahogany was a little harder to find than the white oak but I was very persistent and finally found the wood I was looking for.

I finally got all the squares done and then added the border. After the border was installed I sanded the area and got a lot of satisfaction from the final results. New skills were learned that would be there for the next similar project.