Floorboard Repairs

Board repairs are quoted per board or per affected area rather than per square metre, because the cost is driven by sourcing and access rather than by floor size. Replacing four boards in the middle of a room is a different job to replacing four boards at the edge, and replacing four Tasmanian Oak strips is a different job to replacing four 180 millimetre heritage Baltic Pine boards that have to be found before they can be fitted.

The first question on any repair is why the board failed, because fixing the board without fixing the cause guarantees a repeat. Boards fail from long-term subfloor moisture, from borer, from water ingress at a wet area, from mechanical damage, or from seasonal movement working against a fixed point. Each of those has a different remedy and only one of them — mechanical damage — is genuinely a board-only problem.

Subfloor moisture is the most common cause on the Peninsula and the most commonly ignored. Boards that have sat over damp ground cup, and cupping that has run for years can pass the point of recovery. Ends that meet a wet wall go soft. If we replace those boards without addressing the ventilation, the vapour barrier or the blocked vents, the new boards will do exactly what the old ones did. We take pin-type readings before quoting and we say what needs doing.

Borer damage requires the active-or-historical determination before anything else. Fresh, pale, powdery frass falling freely from one to two millimetre exit holes means live infestation, and replacing boards without treating the joists and remaining board undersides with a penetrating borate preservative simply feeds new timber to an established colony. Dark grey compacted dust means the damage is historical and the replacement can proceed on its own.

Lifting a board without damaging its neighbours is the technical skill in this work. A secret-nailed tongue-and-groove floor is designed not to come apart, and getting one board out cleanly means cutting the tongue along its length, splitting the board out in sections, and clearing the housing without breaking the groove on the board beside it. Done roughly, a four-board repair becomes an eight-board repair.

Matching stock is where most repairs succeed or fail visually. Species, board width, thickness and profile all have to match, and on anything more than about thirty years old the colour of aged timber has to be matched too. New Tasmanian Oak beside fifty-year-old Tasmanian Oak reads as a patch because the older timber has oxidised through its full depth. We source reclaimed stock of the right period where the board count justifies it.

Where an exact match is not achievable, there are two honest options and we present both. Stain the whole floor to a tone deep enough to close the difference, at $12 to $25 per square metre over the sanding, understanding that stain narrows a mismatch rather than erasing it. Or accept the repair as visible and treat it as part of the building’s history, which on a period cottage frequently reads better than a forced uniformity.

A repair almost always triggers a sand of the surrounding area at minimum, and usually of the whole room. A new board sits fractionally proud or low and needs levelling in, and a spot-coated repair will never blend into an aged surrounding finish. Anyone offering to replace boards and touch up the finish locally is describing a repair that will be visible from the doorway.

When the floor is open we look at what is underneath and report it, whether or not the subfloor is in our scope. Joists that have gone soft at a bearing point, bearers with rot running back from a wet area, missing or blocked ventilation, and the absence of any vapour barrier over the soil are all visible once boards are lifted and invisible once they are back down. Telling you about it costs us nothing and saves the next repair, which is a reasonable trade in both directions.