The bedrooms would be our new dining and kitchen, our main space when you walk in, will be restored hardwoods. The problem was that where there was a wall, there was no hardwood. Well I took on the task of patching all the hardwood. It was hard work but so worth it.
The first video is taking pieces out so that I could weave new pieces in. Basically you drill a hole on each side of the piece you want to take out and then run a saw down the middle of the wood on each side of the hole so you can take out a chunk from the middle of the wood. This allows you to pry out the nailed down side and the interlocked side of the piece of wood.
If only I really did that much in 1 minute! The next video is me patching a few pieces back down where there was once a wall. Our kitchen island will be covering up where it looks like I missed some patching. You can see me coming back and forth because I was cutting down the wood to the right size outside. I also put down construction adhesive (Loctite PL Premium) prior to nailing the wood down to help prevent the floor creaking and just to make it a stronger floor.
This was by far the hardest part. It took a REALLY LONG time! Sometimes the places I was patching were very difficult. In one part I had to rip the wood down because I couldn't fit a whole piece in. If you don't get it just right, it does not look good. Sometimes you have to keep rearranging the wood to see which ones work best. This is probably the biggest project I did. My mom helped when she could and pushed me to keep going.
Marks dad cleaned most of the hardwood floor after I was done patching. We had to be careful what cleaner we used to not damage it. The carpet pad that was against the wood left spots of carpet pad that had basically turned into a sticky mush that had been hardened. Not easy to get off.
Here is a picture of a heat register I patched (sorry I should have taken a before picture).
One of the few things we hired out was refinishing the hardwood. I knew I could patch it but I wanted to make sure it was refinished professionally. With 3 kiddos running throughout the house it needed to be scratch resistant. Here is a beautiful picture of the floors after they sanded them down. I couldn't believe it!
And here is the finished product with stain and a Swedish finish.
It feels great knowing that the original hardwoods are still in our house and got to come back to life. I am a nostalgic person and also one that doesn't like things to go to waste (which can sometimes be a bad thing) but in this case a win.
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