A Question for Gotwood....

RobMcBee

RobMcBee

Slow n easy when you're not gettin greasy....
Joined
Jan 12, 2009
Location
Fort Mill / Indian Land SC
Hey @GotWood ,
When we bought out home we had a bad moisture problem. The humidity in the house made the hardwood in our kitchen swell and cup. My plans were to sand and refinish it, but now we have humidity under control they are actually shrinking and pulling apart. Is this something that can be fixed or should I just pull them up and replace them when I pull the carpet and lay wood in the living room.

thanks,
Rob
 
Sanding will help, but if they're loose, they're loose. You can fill them with filler and then sand, but if the boards move much with the changing seasons it can push the filter out. I would try to sand and see what happens. You can rent a sander for the day for less than $75
 
Thanks, some of the gaps are pretty wide. Im not sure if it was all because of the season change. Im sure with the low humidity we've had lately its not helped. When we moved in the humidity was between 60-70%. After fixing those problems it stayed below 55% all summer. Thats when they started pulling apart and some are pretty loose now. think Im just gonna pull em when I do the living room. Just didnt know if there was a trick or something that would help out.

again... thanks for the advice
 
Once they severely cup and swell, they pull the fastener loose from subfloor. If you use a dehumidifier or fix the problem and get the wood to lay back down, it will usually squeak and move around more than usual. You might wait until next summer to do anything. The furnace will dry things out, the a/c will bring humidity back and swell the for back out some.
 
It will be next summer before anything is done anyway. They were definitely severely cupped. Some actually cracked along the edges and a few are moving. I was talking to my wife about possibly having to remove the floor, and now she's talking about ceramic tile...... this rabbit hole just keeps getting deeper.....
 
Two words.... heated floor. If you are remotely thinking about laying down ceramic in the kitchen, put a heated floor mesh below it.
 
I'm not a tile in the kitchen fan personally (surprise!). #1 They are much harder than wood floors, like walking the factory concrete all day, hard. #2 When you drop something it usually cracks a tile and it's screwed, wood floors dent but that's it. #3 Tile goes out of style, which means it will have to be replaced some day. Wood floors can be refinished to a different color much cheaper.
 
That's a good point to bring up. As for the heated floors, our bathroom s are both going to have embedded heating, but I can't justify the cost for the kitchen. It would cost more than the entire project. I will say that having our crawl space encapsulated and conditioned has seriously helped wit the cold floor issues. My crawl is usually very close to the temperature of the living area
 
RobMcBee said:
That's a good point to bring up. As for the heated floors, our bathroom s are both going to have embedded heating, but I can't justify the cost for the kitchen. It would cost more than the entire project. I will say that having our crawl space encapsulated and conditioned has seriously helped wit the cold floor issues. My crawl is usually very close to the temperature of the living area
Click to expand...
That is the absolute best thing you can do for hardwood floors. Keeping above and below the same temp/humidity is ideal.
 
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