Parquet parkour

We are renovating a bedroom so that Rosemine and Lilly get their own, separate rooms. The oak parquet floor had a huge dent which needed fixing. And I did it the hard, easy way. Because I can.

I have no idea how the damage was done because this happened before we bought the house. The dent was quite deep, and the fibres were of course broken. No chance steaming this back up!

Thankfully, the previous owner saved some leftover parquet boards plus some scraps. You know how we men save the perfect piece of wood that we are going to need in 23 years, 60 days, 18 hours, 45 minutes and 19 seconds? Yeah, sometimes it is not the savee that is going to be the usee! But the rule still applies.

So I grabbed a piece of parquet gash from which I cut a piece that was about the same length. I removed the sub layers of pine so that I had just the oak board, scraped off the old glue and sanded the back of the board with 80 grit to give the glue a bit of “bite”. I also cleaned the edges using my hand plane.

Here is the replacement piece in front of the damaged portion:

Note that this is red oak – see the short, brown rays, not unlike those in beech? In red oak, those are usually very short, rarely more than 20 to 25mm (3/4” – 1”). In white oak, these rays are much longer, frequently exceeding 20mm (3/4”).

I set the depth stop of my power router to the thickness of the replacement piece, like so:

I then nudged the depth stop a gnats nadger further down so that the power router would leave a bit of wood behind. I then routed out the majority of the waste. I plunged deeper in a small section to give my router plane a starting point. As you can see, there is not much oak left:

I used a chisel to remove the remaining waste around the perimeter. Using the replacement piece as a guide, I made a knife line on the right hand end (the left hand end is an existing joint). I undercut the edge ever so slightly so that the replacement piece would go in perfectly. I refined the fit so that the replacement piece would fit SNUGLY into the void.

Using the router plane, I refined the bottom and got it flat and parallell with the surrounding floor.

I then checked the fit one last time – I could have gone a smidgen deeper, but I decided against that in order to avoid any whoopsies. I am going to sand the whole floor and give it a new finish, so I’ll just plane the replacement piece flush.

I used Titebond III wood glue for this – it is water resistant and the color is perfect for oak in case there are any glue lines left.

I applied glue to both surfaces, and I was liberal with it on the floor – but not so much that I would not get the replacement piece firmly down.

Using the rubber end of my hammer, I wellyed the piece down firmly. I penciled in an arrow to show which way to plane this so that I would not go against the grain, risking nasty tearout. There was about 0.5-1mm of material to remove to get to flush.

I applied pressure using a big, thick piece of oak and a special support pole one can wedge between the floor and the roof. It is normally used for people with health issues, for example if you need a bed aid or something to grab while using the toilet or stuff like that. And it works like a charm for clamping too! There’s a lever at the bottom that raises the pole against a spring in the roof piece. You could do gymnastics hanging from this thing and it will not fail!

I put down a towel so that I would not glue that huge block of oak to the floor, and to even the pressure – the floor is not dead flat.

After a couple of hours, I removed the clamp and planed the piece flush with the surrounding floor using a No.4 smoothing plane, then gave the area a light buff with sand paper to check the effect (those squiggly lines are from vacuuming).

This was a rather easy fix, and I did not have to remove half the floor in order to swap out the damaged board. By being diligent and use good techniques, I managed to fix the damage very easily. And if the previous owned had not saved any scraps, I could’ve just made a replacement piece from my own stack of lumber. No biggie.

It just goes to show: hand tools makes things SO much more easy to do. Not that having some power to do the donkey work is a bad thing. Not at all! But the control and accuracy you get from hand tools is unbeatable in situations like this. You get to think before the cut is made, and you have complete control at all times. If the power router grabs, you are in for a bad day…

I rented a professional grade floor sander and refinished the floor with a white pigmented lacquer that has some good UV filter in it. As shown in the image above, the floor has yellowed quite a bit over the years. There is about 5mm of oak on top, so this floor has quite a lot of life left and can be sanded 2-3 times before it has to be replaced.

UPDATE 07. December 2024:

Here is a few more pictures of the rest of the process and the result:

After I sanded the whole floor to 120 grit using this orange behemoth of a sander, I used my Bosch ROS with Mirka Abranet sand paper at 80 grit around the edges. Funny thing – the ROS rendered the floor smoother at 80 grit, compared to the floor sanding machine at 120 grit. Therefore I stopped at 80 grit, which proved to work very well. I believe that’s because my random orbital sander is really good. Usually you need to sand to the same grit everywhere.

I used my Bosch multi cutter with a sanding attachment in the corners.

Can you spot the repair? Look for the very short piece near the center of the image. You need to KNOW where to look to spot it! I call this a successful repair.

Finally, a few pictures of the finishing process and the end result; I applied two coats of pigmented, oil based lacquer, then a liberal coat of water based clear, silk matte lacquer (check with the manufacturer before you try something similar!):

Look at the doorstep – that is the color of the floor before I refinished it! The difference is quite remarkable. The flooring in the hallway is some sort of MDF laminate. It is a HUGE difference in feeling when you walk on real wood!

The total cost of this floor refinish is almost as much as replacing the whole flooring all together, so it is really a coin-toss whether to do one or the other, cost-wise. But there is something to be said about re-using and maintaining existing things.

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