Hardwood Floor Repair in Wilmington, DE

Water left standing by a leaky dishwasher or a plant pot, pet stains, burns and deep gouges ruin the boards they sit on. Dark stains in oak can run deep into the wood, so sanding the surface does not reach them. The fix is to cut out the damaged boards and replace them. A board is removed by cutting down its middle and splitting it out, so the tongues and grooves of its neighbors are not broken in the process.

A squeak is wood rubbing against wood or a nail sliding in its hole. Boards work loose from the subfloor, or the subfloor lifts off a joist, leaving a small gap that closes with every step. Where the floor can be reached from a basement, the gap can be closed from below without touching the finished surface. Where it can't, the loose boards are fastened from above into the framing, and the fastener heads are set below the surface and filled. A soft spot that gives underfoot is a subfloor problem, and the subfloor gets repaired before boards go back over it.

Where a wall came down, a radiator was removed, or a heating register was moved, the floor can be left with a gap, a pipe hole, or a square of plywood covered with a rug. Those spots are filled with full-length boards woven into the floor around them, so the repair reads as part of the floor rather than a box set into it.

A repair only disappears when the new boards match on three counts. Species comes first. Red oak has a pinkish cast and open pores, while white oak is browner with tighter pores, so the two look different side by side even with the same finish. Width is next: a board a quarter inch off breaks the rhythm of the rows. Thickness matters because a board that sits a hair high or low catches the light and the foot. Original floors can come in widths and thicknesses that current stock does not match exactly. In that case, boards can sometimes be borrowed from inside a closet, where the wood has aged the same way as the rest of the floor, and the closet gets the new boards instead.

Lacing is what hides the seams. Original floors were laid with the end joints scattered across the room, so the old boards are cut back to different lengths and the new boards are laced in to overlap them. To get the last board into place, the bottom lip of its groove is trimmed off so it can drop in, and it is glued and face-nailed with the nail heads set and filled.

When the carpet comes up in a Wilmington row home, there may be original oak underneath. A floor that spent decades under carpet carries the marks of it: a line of nail holes from the tack strip around the walls, pad staples, and stains that soaked through the carpet into the wood. The old boards were cut and milled to the sizes of their day, and the wood has darkened with age, so matching them is the slow part of the job. Narrow oak strips are the other floor we find, in Hockessin houses from the 1990s, either sanded and finished in place or bought with a factory finish already on. A site-finished strip floor can take new strips sanded flush, with the finish discussed in the estimate. A prefinished floor needs replacement boards from the same product line because the color, the sheen, and the small bevel at each board edge all have to line up, and a discontinued line narrows the choice.

A new floor in another room is a flooring installation.