House in Progress Diary

I was very glad our floor guy had some old maple planks in his garage he used to patch our original kitchen floor. These ugly finished boards filled in where our floor was bad and when he sanded it matched beautifully it was amazing to see the beautiful wood under the old varnish finishes. He didn't have enough so used new maple in the closet. The new is quite different looking from the old. If you're trying to match an old floor, the old stuff will look great. E-mail me if you want his number, he is in Chicago and very reasonable.

I'd highly recommend using the old flooring. We've layed about 400 square feet of reclaimed pine flooring in our house. It looks great and it didn't require much more in the way of prep work. As long as it has most of its tongue & groove and all the nails are pulled, it should be fine.

In my experience, most contractors hate reclaimed or salvaged material. However, if you make the effort to prep it for them, they can usually be persuaded to use it.

Good luck.

Oak is fairly easy to match using either old wood or new. Sure, they can use the old boards...and an experienced floor person won't bat an eye when you point to your pile. Don't sweat it though, if you don't have enough....new can be indistinguishable. I patched a whole lot of oak boards in my house....and my parents just added t&g oak to their kitchen to match the rest of the 50+ old oak flooring in their house. The key to making oak look original is to duplicate length of boards (aside from some staining).....some contractors like to use "shorties" because they are less expensive and easier to work with.

Make sure your contractor not only has a lot of experience refinishing floors, but also specifically patching.

Matching maple, birch or fir is another story.....

we used all salvaged heart pine in our remodel in our first house in orlando fl, laid the upstairs ouselves, paid to have the downstairs laid. The guys knocked it out much faster than us for sure. We had a little trouble with some warped pieces that we should have either cut off or laid aside. But when we were done and they were refinished they were the gem of the job. Plus we kept 2000sf out of the trash mountain and there was no packaging to dispose of once completed. While I wish that the buildings from which the flooring came had not been demoed, salvage is an excellent form of recycling. use the old stuff.

My 2 cents: We used a few new maple boards replacing some damaged ones in our kitchen and they look fine- they are not in the middle of the room so they blend in well. They are a bit more pristine than the originals, but the color was fine.