huge gaps in floorboards

[catkin]

I have been renovating for a few months now and need to start on the floors, but there are huge gaps between our wooden floorboards - all varying sizes from 0.5mm to about 30 or 40mm. The boards are beautiful and I don't want to cover them up but don't know how to go aobut filling the gaps. Someone mentioned i should be using rope - does anyone have any idea how?! Thanks!

How spooky...I move to a new (but old) house next minth and am making a plan on keeping energy costs low. One tip from EST is insulating the floor, which made me think of something I saw years ago whereby gaps were filled with thick twine. Thought I might have imagined it but your posts making me think .... hmm off to Google lol

ooh if you find out anything interesting can you post it? I have been searching and came up with oakum but can't find anywhere about how you are supposed to actually do it or where you get the stuff from!! Good luck with the house move :-)

Pants,just realised I cant do links lol google a Guarduan article from Friday 16 December 2011 on draughtproofing, interesting read ( well as interesting as these things get lol) on a trial of 6 products.

Got it :-) obviously equally techie as have just realised that installing java on my laptop this evening has somehow changed my search engine standard from google to ask (didn't even realise ask still existed!!). We have loads of gaps so I am thinking that the expensive stuff is going to be really expensive. Wonder if i can do the papier mache and then the rope / oakum whatever it turns out to be on top as a finish, and then do a final sand and oil? Its a minefield with this one!!!

Catkin, the boards have probably shrunk due to age and more likely due to central heating being installed at a much later date after the house was built which has caused the timbers to shrink. The easiest and cheapest option I can suggest is to remove the floorboards (easy to do) and lay down sheets of 8x4 feet of thin ply board or hardboard which is very cheap to buy then place the floorboards back over the top.

30 or 40mm.

An inch and a half? Are you sure?

It's a fire issue too, if you had a fire downstairs the smoke can get upstairs very quickly. I saw it on a Sarah Beeney show once.

We have floorboards in this house and its not nice. It's also damaged the head on my lovely Miele vacuum cleaner

I know it sounds excessive on the gap front, and most of them are less than 30-40mm but there are some HUGE gaps about that size and I am thinking I will need to get a couple of reclaimed boards and splice those in for the huge gaps, but as to the rest of them ... its seems to be a minefield and I just don't know where to start really. Anyone know if the papier mache as a base, followed by the strange sounding oakum over the top would work? I hadn't thought about the fire / smoke risk before, so now I really need to get started with it all!!!!

Catkin , if you decide to remove the boards and do what I suggested you can relay the old boards tight together and add 2 or 3 new boards in at the end to solve the problem and save hours/days of work filling in small narrow gaps and a lot of cutting.