When it comes to hardwood flooring, older floors often have a look and feel that just can't be replicated. Unfortunately, older hardwood flooring doesn't always span an entire house, particularly if an addition was built long after the initial build.
Here are some ways for you to patch older flooring to make it look and feel better than new.
Thresholds
Often, original flooring begins and ends at the thresholds of additions added on after the original build and/or significant renovations. In fact, this is one of the reasons why carpeting became such a fad in the 1970s and 1980s, due to being cheaper than properly patching these flooring changes.
- Bold Transitions: if your kitchen and dining room have flooring from different eras, making the rooms flow well may start with matching the rooms from the flooring up. You can create bold transitions when making these changes that both honor and improve your original floors. For instance, if your original floors are wide pine planks, you might use a tiger oak or mahogany plank to create a bold transition at the threshold dividing the rooms. This is particularly effective if your flooring changes from hardwood to tile or poured concrete.
Baseboards
The most painstaking part of any flooring installation process is likely to be at the edges of the floors. This is particularly true when you're working with the flooring near the baseboards.
- Adding Space: baseboard spacers extend from the bottom of your baseboards to your floors. You can often get away with swapping out new spacers to avoid replacing the entire baseboards. When choosing new spacers, you might consider new edges. For instance, you might opt for a rounded or square shape to match or contrast the dominate edging found throughout the room. This is especially effective if the room has crown molding. The edging used for the crown molding can feel like a continuation of the edging used on the baseboard spacers.
Lighten Up
You don't need to completely replace your floor with new flooring to get a lighter color. When adding patches to restore original flooring, your best bet to make sure the staining matches is to start from scratch. Having your hardwood flooring installation professional, such as the team at Floorcoverings of Marin County, strip the original floors down and add unfinished floor patching will give them the chance to stain the entire floor to make sure they match. This is particularly important when trying to lighten up the floors.