Patch wood floors

Do you know why they paint barns red?
Because you can't hide them.

Sometimes it's easier to strategically remove even more boards to make a pattern/border with something contrasting than to match old flooring.

Or change a large section of floor. Unless your floors were running parallel to the wall you removed.

Yes, 30. That is my plan - to change the board layout e.g. run the boards the opposite way - so that any difference in grain or color or is less noticeable.

300, that is more expensive option and I am a cheapskate. Also, changing a larger floor area may make the new floor even more noticeable. I have had good luck in the past with such work but don't know a good floor guy I can trust anymore.

Don't know a floor guy but if your closets have that wood, switching those out gets an even effect with refinishing.

Do you plan on installing new floor and refinishing all the flooring?

Floor guys have told me that if you are in a prewar then the floors are hard to match because "old" wood grew slower, and therefore has a different grain, than "newer" wood does. (Old-growth vs. fertilized). It's not even a color problem, it's a grain problem -- so I think stache's suggestion to cannibalize the wood from your closets is a good one.

Primer05, refinishing to match? That would be a good idea but I refinished all the floors a few years ago. I just want to fill in the missing wood around 4 decorative columns I reduced in size, plus a 5" x 8"wide strip I demo'd a wall to open up the kitchen. Guess no more than 10sf combined. I did no think this would be complicated but now I see it is not as easy as I thought.

front_porch/stache, excellent idea as I agree about grain vs. stain color. Sadly, my closet floors are concrete. But I did similar work in my old apartment when I demo'd a fake fireplace and had to repair a leaking pipe under my living room floor. Work came out great, really hard to see the difference. But this guy is not available.

ximon,

Can you send me a picture of what your talking about? I think I would use something other than wood if at all possible. If you are not refinishing the floor it will look odd

You can email me: jeff@primerenovationsnyc.com

Thanks a lot, Jeff.

Or cannibalize a hallway?

Yes, stache, another good suggestion. Although I would need to replace the hallway floor, the new wood would hopefully be much less noticeable there.

Especially if it was lain in a different pattern.

I appreciate all the feedback but mostly looking for the name of a good floor guy for a small but challenging job in a Manhattan apartment. Any names?

Thanks in advance.

Thiago did a great job fixing my floors after another contractor did a horrible job: eaglehardwoodflooringny.com He does a lot of work in the city.

Just finished up my floors yesterday. Came out pretty good. Used Verrazano Floors out of Bay Ridge and they were very professional. Took 4 days because subfloor is concrete so needed one day to prepare sub-flooring, one day for gluing down new floor and two days to stain, do three layers of oil-based poly and buff in between.

I was surprised my building allows oil-based poly which you can apparently now only buy in quart containers but the product must be vastly improved from the old days as it not only dried very quickly but had little odor.

To match the older floors, they stained first. Almost a perfect color match.

The only problem is that the new flooring still looks new. One reason is that on the old floor there are dark lines in between the boards. Doe anyone know how to make the new floors look a little older by darkening the spaces between the floorboards kind like you do with tile grout?

I would think the time to do that would be before the poly went on?

I remember reading an article quite a while ago about restaurant build outs where they were trying to give brand new renovations "aged" appearances and one of the techniques they mentioned was dragging heavy chains across the floors.

Heavy chains is also the way they make furniture look distressed. Well, I would like floors to look older but not damaged. Yes, should have done before the poly I guess. Maybe just use a black or dark gray crayon? Time to experiment!