Replacing old pine floor boards
We have antique heart pine floors (originally, subfloors) and a few planks are water damaged beyond repair. We’d like to replace those boards, rather than re-doing the whole floor. There are a number of places online that sell antique heart pine, but I’m wondering how difficult it is to match the old floors…. has anyone…
We have antique heart pine floors (originally, subfloors) and a few planks are water damaged beyond repair. We’d like to replace those boards, rather than re-doing the whole floor. There are a number of places online that sell antique heart pine, but I’m wondering how difficult it is to match the old floors…. has anyone out there done this? Any suggestions?
Here is a photo…
Are you sure that’s pine? B/C that looks ALOT like my floors (which were also subfloors) and i found out the floor was actually fir not pine. We had a similar problem of needing to replace sections of the floor and we found that it was impossible to find fir replacement wood in the size that was used for our brownstone. (well ok it was possible if you custom ordered it and spent thousands but at that point you might as well replace the entire floor). What we ended up doing was we tiled a hallway (which we were planning anyway) so we tore up the subflooring and used that to replace the other flooring.
From the photo I’m not sure if what you have is real heart pine or just old pine with a lovely color. In any case, if you want heart pine there’s a great source of recycled wood in upstate NY called Pioneer Millworks (website is same name). They mill new floor boards (various widths, either t&g or plank) from old wood — using, for example, beams from demolished buildings. We bought both heart pine and douglas fir from them and have been very pleased with both. The heart pine is more expensive — but also much harder. If you want old pine flooring, you’d be better off with a local salvage outfit.
If they are the original subfloor pieces, it will be hard to replace them.
They are tongue and groove and exactly one inch thick, something you would have to have custom made. OR find someone ripping floors out of a brownstone.
Another good match for old pine floors is hickory.
Buying antique heart pine is the best match you will get. It’s best to do some stain samples on scrap to get a really good color match.