Restoring wooden floors

[Alienspaceship]

We’re buying an older house with carpets but hoping to lift these and possibly restore the floorboards. The floorboards seem uneven under the carpet. To what extent can floorboards be restored by professionals?

Anyone?

It's hard to tell until you actually have a look at them. Often they can be rotten/have evidence of woodworm so will need replacing. If they're just a bit loose/wobbly, you can sort that yourself!

We have just restored all of the floorboards in our house (two rooms and hallway downstairs, two rooms and landing upstairs). Luckily none were rotten but plenty were loose, so they needed to be fixed to the joists below (very simple job). Then all exposed nails/screws/pins had to be protruded as if you are using a big industrial sander, the floor cannot have anything sticking out or it will rip the sandpaper or worse - break the machine (personal experience...). Sanding, staining and (matt) varnishing the floor took a lot of work but was completely worth it. Get professionals in would have been a hell of a lot easier but the price reflects that.

Replacing rotten boards can be expensive if you've got lots to replace, but getting a whole new floor is more expensive!

Mine were in DREADFUL shape - stained, mottled, creaky - and a restoring company got them looking great. There were a couple with woodworm marks which I'm just living with, but I'm sure you could find one that would replace the odd old board if needed.

We did ours ourselves, got pine slithers to fill the gaps, chiseled to removed 1000s of nails etc, sanded, stained and varnished. Only did a room but it took a long time.

One thing to note is where the chimney breast had been removed, downstairs was filled with concrete, so we had to cover with engineered wood and upstairs was chipboard, so we covered with our bed. You never know what you are going to get underneath.

Most likely getting a company in will be a lot easier if they aren't rotten. If they are, you'd probably still want to replace anyway.

They can make the look new again. They basically sand nine times, differing levels of grit till they get a smooth finish. Replace any worn floor boards, fill any holes, varnish. It's up to you how far you want them to go. But if you want to know how far they can go, generally they can make them look like new

Old Oak floor boards look great but cheap knotty pine less good in my view. If they seem uneven you will just have to look at them critically and see whether sanding or refixing is the answer. We have replaced a couple of oak floor boards and it worked well. Slightly different colour to begin with but there is no great difference now. I would be wary of spending a lot of money on very cheap pine floorboards though.

Thanks all, that’s really great. I’d much prefer to restore if possible than get new floors.