john smith III
11-23-2012, 9:00 PM
Hi All,
We bought a 1951 ranch house with hardwood (oak) floors. The floors had never been finished and lived under carpet for the entire history of the house.
The thing is, the previous owner had nailed the padding / carpet to the floor using nails and when I say nailed I mean it looks like someone got drunk, picked up a nailing gun and let loose- there are nails everywhere at just completely random places. Some are brads but most have *very* noticeable heads
that have been driven clear through the supporting boards of the floor- in the basement you can see them poking through the basement ceiling / underside of the floor.
I would like to not replace the floor, not least of all because it's otherwise very beautiful with some 12-15ft 2-1/4in planks fitted tightly together. Replacing it would be not less than 5k (1300 sq ft) for something decent from LL and then there's the labor etc.
I could try to pass the look off as "rustic" or "authentic" or "reclaimed" or whatever, but realistically, it just looks baaaad.
I am willing to pull the nails out /pound them out from underneath. But then I have holes in the floor. Filling these with any of the various putty wood fillers is just going to look tacky; plus, that stuff ages differently than the wood and takes up dirt and stains differently etc., so even if it starts out looking passable over time it will be a source of regret.
I have had a variety of ideas. My main idea is to treat it as an art project. Try "connecting the dots" with some sort of random design inlay or try to mill a lot of narrow oak or maybe contrasting strips and end up with a sort of one-of-a-kind random stripped look. I am up for any of these projects and I don't care what it looks like in the end except that it has to look *good*.
So I thought I would ask here and see if anyone had a simpler solution or had had this problem and solved it somehow. Perhaps someone has a crazy creative design or idea that *just might work* .
I have looked for inlay designs or just art and designs online which might be applied to this problem and tried to imagine what the floor would look like if I copied them, but so far nothing has caught my imagination.
This is a completely open-ended question and I will gladly entertain any idea, opinion, notion, POV , insight, war-story or crazy idea anyone has.
Thanks in advance.
We bought a 1951 ranch house with hardwood (oak) floors. The floors had never been finished and lived under carpet for the entire history of the house.
The thing is, the previous owner had nailed the padding / carpet to the floor using nails and when I say nailed I mean it looks like someone got drunk, picked up a nailing gun and let loose- there are nails everywhere at just completely random places. Some are brads but most have *very* noticeable heads
that have been driven clear through the supporting boards of the floor- in the basement you can see them poking through the basement ceiling / underside of the floor.
I would like to not replace the floor, not least of all because it's otherwise very beautiful with some 12-15ft 2-1/4in planks fitted tightly together. Replacing it would be not less than 5k (1300 sq ft) for something decent from LL and then there's the labor etc.
I could try to pass the look off as "rustic" or "authentic" or "reclaimed" or whatever, but realistically, it just looks baaaad.
I am willing to pull the nails out /pound them out from underneath. But then I have holes in the floor. Filling these with any of the various putty wood fillers is just going to look tacky; plus, that stuff ages differently than the wood and takes up dirt and stains differently etc., so even if it starts out looking passable over time it will be a source of regret.
I have had a variety of ideas. My main idea is to treat it as an art project. Try "connecting the dots" with some sort of random design inlay or try to mill a lot of narrow oak or maybe contrasting strips and end up with a sort of one-of-a-kind random stripped look. I am up for any of these projects and I don't care what it looks like in the end except that it has to look *good*.
So I thought I would ask here and see if anyone had a simpler solution or had had this problem and solved it somehow. Perhaps someone has a crazy creative design or idea that *just might work* .
I have looked for inlay designs or just art and designs online which might be applied to this problem and tried to imagine what the floor would look like if I copied them, but so far nothing has caught my imagination.
This is a completely open-ended question and I will gladly entertain any idea, opinion, notion, POV , insight, war-story or crazy idea anyone has.
Thanks in advance.