Timber Floors

[deliria]

Back in September of 2001 we had a flooring person out to look at the floors of a house we had just purchased in Tempe.
It was obvious to us that quite a few of the floorboards had been poorly repaired in the past (after termite damage with some sort of wood putty), & we asked to have all suspect boards replaced & then for all the floors to be sanded & polished. Unfortunately, the flooring person seemed to think that no floorboards needed replacing & only sanded & polished our floors. Now a lot of the floorboards that should have been replaced are starting to splinter & split. We have been told that we can have these individual boards replaced but that the replacement boards wouldn't be sanded & polished. As we have boards that need replacing in every room, does this mean we would need to have all of our floors sanded & polished again? This seems a bit rough seeing we only had them done 4 years ago & all damaged boards should have been replaced then when the house was empty. My question is, can all the damaged boards (about 20 altogether in various rooms) be replaced without the need to have to sand & polish our floors all over again? Can pre sanded & polished boards be purchased to replace the damaged ones?

Thanks
Connie

[seriph1]

I feel you might want to consider having one room full of boards as a "donor" in order to repair the other rooms..... sure you can match new boards to the rest but this is a big job I believe as you would first need to get the same species, then the same general look, then machine/sand/plane them to the same thickness as their counterparts, then colour-match and laquer - then fix to the bearers...... also, removing the existing "damaged" boards may result in at least slight damage to the existing boards depending how it is done.....one thing you will probably have to do with any replacement boards is remove the lower side of the groove so you can get the board in place..... which lowers the strength.....

fun huh?

Hope this is at least a little info if not very helpful.

[Gaza]

We have tried on many differnt occasions to replace boards in new floors due to damage by builders or cilents not happy with the boards colour. (I know its timber but they paid for it to be changed).

You always end up damaging the boards around the one your are taking out. the problem of installing new boards is that gap between the boards is not always the same ie not 80mm can be 78mm, 81mm 80mm down the length of the board. so its is a very hard job to get the new boards in, then you have to worry about sanding and coating which will never give a glass like finsh the new boards will always stand out.

The past floor sander was just to lazy to do it right the first time, a floor installers best friend is putty,

it is common for installers to say "the sander will fix that" i never let this happen on my jobs because how is taking off 2mm going to fix any thing.