Good Enough Floor Repair
I can't believe this story is already a week old, but here goes anyway. After the floor guys came and left because they were "unequipped" to fix my floors, I had to fix them myself. It wasn't as hard as I had imagined. It didn't involve the usual multiple trips to the hardware or switching to back-up plans or anything like some previous projects. Like say the bathroom tile incident. Pretty much, after the bathroom tile problems, I didn't want to go near these patches. It was worth it to pay someone to do it for me for $50. Oh well.
One reason I was hesitant was because I never really found any good instruction on how to do it. Greg told me about cutting off part of the groove and what not, but it still didn't click. This cheesy website told me to use a chisel primarily to make cuts at the end of the board and then split the middle with a chisel. I didn't realize that these instructions were for wood plank placed over a subfloor. Otherwise they usually tell you to drill holes where you want to make cuts like an inch away from a joist, and then connect the holes with a jigsaw cut perpendicular or a circular saw down the length of the board (like these instructions). Then you nail a 2x4 to the old joist so you have something for the new floor board to sit on.
I ended up doing the whole thing with a chisel and a circular saw. And it was damn loud. First there was constant pounding in a big empty, echoy room. Then after I fired up the circular saw I would go deaf for brief period. All this noise led to one of my neighbors to leave a note in my door about neighborhood courtesy. That was the first time I had heard any complaints, but this was definitely some of the loudest most annoying work I've done so far. Especially since all of it was after I got off work at night.
Everything worked out okay in the end. The flooring I bought at salvage was just barely thinner than my old flooring but the gaps aren't all that noticeable. I had to sand a bunch of paint off them with my belt sander too but other than that, well worth the $14 bucks they cost me. I didn't end up splitting any of the wrong boards like I was worried about and I didn't run out of flooring at the last minute. The verdict: Definitely pretty much good enough.