A bespoke floor restoration, room by room

A laying fault that goes back a long way

Upstairs in this barn in Campan, the oak floor had been nailed onto chipboardChipboard (French aggloméré): a panel made of wood chips glued and pressed together. Cheap and common as a floor substrate, but soft: it will not hold a nail for long, especially under a hardwood like oak. panels. It is a pairing that cannot work: oak is a hardwood, chipboard a soft substrate, and the nails never had anything to bite into. The floor moves, it sings, and that fault does not go away. Faced with this, I usually hear two answers: miss the fault altogether, or rip the lot out and lay new. Over a hundred square metres of solid oak that only needs sanding, that is neither the same budget nor the same job.

A different answer in every room

So we looked at the floor room by room, and each time I explained what could be saved, at what price and with what result. Every room was sanded back and restored. What changes from one room to the next is how the substrate was dealt with: in the bedroom, the worst affected, every board was re-screwed from above, then each screw head filled to the right shade, between the sealer and the varnish. Elsewhere, the owners preferred to stick to the restoration itself, knowing exactly what that meant. In the bathrooms, the timber close to the shower and the bath was planed back and repaired where the old protection had failed.

Chamfered boards, and a job run as a pair

One difficulty belongs to this floor alone: the boards are chamferedChamfer: a small bevel cut along the edge of each board. It draws a neat groove between boards, very handsome, but impossible to fill with filler across a whole floor., unlike the ground floor. There is no filling those grooves: each repair had to be judged board by board to keep the whole thing consistent to the eye. Then comes the finish, the same everywhere: sanding back to bare wood, an anti-tannin sealerSealer (French fond dur): an impregnating product applied before the varnish. Here in its anti-tannin version, to stop the tannins in the oak rising up and staining the finish., then two coats of matt floor varnish. The job was run as a pair with Florian Balzac (FB Agencement), a partner joiner. And so the couple could move into a house that was properly finished, most of the walls were given a coat of paint before handover.

One last thing, because it matters: the original fault has been reduced, not removed. Some areas still sing a little. That was said before we started, and decided together. I would rather say so plainly than promise a result I cannot deliver.

The questions I often get asked

How do you tell whether an old floor can be saved or should be lifted? Can each room of the same floor be treated differently? Can a floor nailed onto a poor substrate ever go quiet again? And does it all have to be done at once, or can it be spread over time?

I have practical answers to all of that, and two articles to dig further: restoring an old wood floor and why a wood floor creaks. For your own case, give me a call: the quote is free. I speak English, so feel free to call or write in English.