Advice to fix my old floor? Gaps bet. slats, loose slats, etc
In the hallway in my apt, some of the wood slats are loose and there are big gaps between some of them, as well as some sticking up a little. I am looking for advice on what I can do do a) fill in the gaps between the slats and b) get the loose slats…
In the hallway in my apt, some of the wood slats are loose and there are big gaps between some of them, as well as some sticking up a little. I am looking for advice on what I can do do a) fill in the gaps between the slats and b) get the loose slats to stay down. My socks and pants cuffs sometimes get stuck on these loose slats. I am putting a link to some pictures below so you can see the floor and the issue I am seeing. Also, if anyone can tell me by looking what kind of floor this is, I would appreciate it. Is it pine? The building/apt is about 100 years old in Park Slope, but I dont know how old the floors are. Any help is appreciated:
www.pilotyid.com/floor/floor.html
I have the same problem in my 100 yr old townhouse. My floors are solid oak. I filled the cracks with wood putty; it was stainable and was the color of oak. I felt the house is 100 yrs old and the gaps in the floor were from the house settling. The gaps didn’t change any in summer or winter. I don’t claim to be a professional on flooring, but thought you like to know what I did.
It’s old fashioned, but it works – you can use rope to fill the spaces. Clean out the spaces between the planks and fill it with rope (100% cotton) that has be dyed to match the wood. Wood putty cracks over time. Rope leaves room for expansion/contraction.
One of the things I have used on the cracks on my wide plank pine floors upstairs is caulk. You can get brown shades, but even if you use white caulk it shrinks and gets dusty, and cannot be seen after a while.
If there is a splinter that snags on your socks, glue it down.
actually, you don’t want to fill the gaps with anything. I have the same problem with my 100
year old pine floors. In the summer, the wood
expands, so if you fill the gaps, the wood slats will buckle from pressure in the summer, then crack
in the winter, when the wood shrinks.
It’s really just something you have to live with
if you don’t want to replace the floors (which
I don’t recommend)
Thanks for the response, but I am not looking to replace the floor, but rather something that could be done to fill in the gaps and maybe get the 1 or 2 loose slats to stay down. Anything exist like this?
Thanks again
Below is a previous post and previous answers in case it helps. I don’t know if your floor is the same though. You can see a pic of the pine floor on the post dated:
November 26, 2006
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 out there done this? Any suggestions?
Here is a photo…
Posted by anon at November 26, 2006 9:54 PM
Comments
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.
Posted by: Rick at November 27, 2006 5:58 AM
Another good match for old pine floors is hickory.
Posted by: Anonymous at November 27, 2006 8:28 AM
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.
Posted by: Anonymous at November 27, 2006 8:39 AM
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.
Posted by: NeoGrec at November 27, 2006 12:46 PM
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.