Hardwood Floors April/May 2017

Unique Techniques

By Aaron Schaalma

How to Add Flair to Your Repair

How many times have you encountered a situation where a homeowner decided to remove a wall and now there is an area where flooring is missing? You might decide that the best solution is to simply install the same species of wood where the wall was once located. But why not be a little more creative and make it look less like a repair and more like a planned feature strip? Join me as I take you step-by-step through this process featuring a recent installation my team did. STEP ONE: THE LAYOUT We began by first laying out the border placement in the area that needed to be repaired. Then we determined the center point of the wall so that we could measure off the center line to the widest part. This way, we could then determine the total width of the border. We needed to take into consideration the fact that the border lengths come in 3-foot sections. Instead of starting from one side and being left with a small piece at the end, we had to determine the center point of the repair and then go from the left and right to make the border centered in the space.

STEP TWO: THE CUT Next, we used a track saw to make sure that the cut was going to be a nice, straight, factory-cut. For the areas that the track saw was unable to get, we used a small oscillating tool to finish up the end cuts.

STEP THREE: THE SUBFLOOR PREP Making the subfloor as flat as possible can be a challenge in older homes. In our case, to try and get the subfloor as flat as possible, we used a rotary sander in the area where the border was to be placed. The two existing floors were not level, and as a result, we had to sand down the high spots and shim the low spots to achieve as flat a subfloor as possible while working with existing floors.

the magazine of the national wood flooring association

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