How to Salvage a Hardwood Floor: Piece by Painstaking Piece

Q. DEAR TIM: I'm faced with a hardwood floor repair. Water seeped under my front door and warped the floor. What's involved in a job like this? I'm usually not too timid when it comes to home repairs, but I'm out of my comfort zone. I realize the hardwood floor is made up of interlocking pieces, but I can't figure out how to remove single pieces, much less install new ones. -- Dan B., San Jose

A. DEAR DAN: I'll tell you what's involved in a hardwood repair like this: lots of frustration. This is a task often best left to a professional. You could probably work your way through the job, but a professional could complete the task and be on the road to the next job while you are still futzing around with the wood chisel.

Repairing a hardwood floor is difficult because of the shape of each piece of wood. Full-size pieces are typically 3/4 -inch thick and have either a tongue or a groove on each of the four side edges. The tongue fits into the corresponding groove on an adjacent piece of flooring, interlocking the pieces. This means you can't just pry up a piece of flooring as you might pull up a board on your outdoor deck.

Flooring professionals have different techniques for removing a single floorboard, but just about any pro will start by carefully removing the center one-third or so of the damaged floorboard. This allows you to pull the remaining two pieces sideways away from the adjacent flooring toward the center of the space. If you just try to pry up the pieces of flooring, you can crack off the tongue or groove of the good pieces you're trying to salvage.

You should probably use a circular saw to start removing the center of the damaged floorboard. Carefully set the depth of the blade so it cuts only the flooring and not into the subfloor beneath the hardwood.

Because the saw blade is circular, it will not be able to cut full depth to the outer edges of the hardwood strip flooring. You'll have to finish that task carefully with a router or a wood chisel. This will require extreme patience, skill and precision because you shouldn't touch the adjacent pieces of flooring with the tools. If you do, then you'll be replacing multiple pieces.

Once you have the ruined flooring out, it's time to conjure up every ounce of master-finish-carpentry skill you have. You have to produce a piece of new hardwood flooring that is the exact size of the one you removed. Your tolerance for error is perhaps the thickness of a piece of paper.

But note that you have to get the new piece of flooring into a rectangle that has two tongues and two grooves. The only way you can do this is to cut off the tongue on the short edge and cut off the bottoms of the two grooves on your replacement piece of flooring.

Even having done that, you need patience and skill to insert the new piece of flooring without damaging its edges as well as the adjacent pieces.

Once you have the new piece of hardwood flooring nested into position, it needs to be face-nailed. Don't ruin the wood by splitting it. I recommend drilling pilot holes that are slightly smaller than the diameter of the finish nails.

Don't use regular finish nails. There are special finish nails with fairly blunt tips. You can get these from a hardware store or from a professional who regularly installs hardwood flooring. While you are picking them up from the pro, be sure to ask him if he has an opening in his schedule to bail you out. My money says you will be calling him to finish what you start.

Tim Carter can be contacted via his Web site, http://www.askthebuilder.com/printer_Submit_Question.shtml.

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