Like so many houses from the post-war era, our place has a huge hole in the hallway floor where an old oil furnace vent used to be. The furnace has long been drained and filled with sand, but the grate was never removed or replaced.
The old vent was depressed to the point that it seemed unsound, but we eventually learned to walk around it without even noticing it was there. It wasn’t until our first winter in the house when I realized how much cold air was seeping through the porous opening.
Since I have little patience for useless things in my home and life, I pulled the vent out of the floor, climbed down into the crawlspace (along with the cats, who were ecstatic to discover this secret chamber), and patched the hole with some scrap plywood I had laying around in the workshop. I carefully braced and insulated it and promised the wife I’d eventually get around to patching it. The first time we had guests over, I wrote “WORK IN PROGRESS” on the wood so people would know we don’t think it looks fine as is. Two years later, the writing is almost entirely worn off.
I think the reason I let this project linger for so long is because I knew that short of refinishing the floors in the entire house, there was no way I could make new hardwood properly blend in. As I’ve written before, I hate the thought of doing work that screams “DIY.” But in this case, I really didn’t have much of a choice. I accepted that I would never be able to match the hardwood color exactly, so I decided to strip and lay unfinished slats. The lazy way to patch the hole would be to cut a couple dozen pieces just wide enough to fit in the hole and glue them down. I actually had several handymen/carpenters offer to do this for me for a few hundred bucks. But that method would advertise to everyone that the floor had been patched, even if the stain color matched perfectly. The only way to properly patch the floor was to weave new slats into the woodwork just like the original pieces were laid. That meant removing all the slats that terminated in the old vent opening and replacing them with new wood.
To properly fix the hardwood floor, I divided the project into three steps, each of which would take several hours to complete.
- Wood Preparation
- Wood Removal & Replacement
- Wood Restoration
I recently bought some antique, oak hardwood slats from The Old House Salvage. I have honey oak floors and the natural wood is pretty close to that color (when it’s wet). Unfortunately, some of the scraps I got had been stained a mahogany tint.
To prepare the wood, I had to sand the slats down and remove all the coloring. This was pretty exhausting work, especially in the summer heat.
Next, I had to cut the tongues and the lower groove off of all the slats. In order to set them flush, I had to remove everything but the wooden lip over the groove. Here’s how the slats looked when I bought them.
I really could have used a helper when I was ripping the boards. After a lot of relatively dangerous work with my table saw, here’s what the slats looked like.
Finally, I went over the slats a few times with higher and higher grit sandpaper. Now that it’s all smooth, it’s time to move on to the Wood Removal & Replacement stage. As a precaution, I moved the finished slats into the house so they can adjust to the temperature and humidity for a couple of days.
UPDATE: Patching A Hardwood Floor, Part 2
Tags: groove, hardwood, Oak, oil furnace, salvage, slats, tongue
