There are certain areas of your floor that get more traffic than others. So what do you do when one heavily trafficked area of your hardwood floor looks worn while the rest of it is OK?
A reader sent an e-mail saying she has parquet hardwood flooring in her kitchen and eating area, and it has a badly worn trail where her family does most of its walking. The house is about 35 years old, and the floor came with the house. A contractor said the only way to repair the damage is to resurface the whole floor, but the reader wonders if it wouldn’t be cheaper just to replace the portion of the floor that is worn.
Parquet refers to the pattern of flooring that is made up of small strips of wood (maybe an inch wide and 6 inches long) glued together side by side to form squares. The squares are installed in an alternating pattern so the strips in one square run perpendicular to the strips in the next square.
Fred Simpson of Simpson Floor Sanding in Wilmington, Ohio, and Kurt Little of Kent Little Floor Refinishing in Dayton, Ohio, agreed that the best bet is to have the whole floor sanded down and refinished. Both said just resurfacing the area that is worn or trying to replace the old boards with new ones won’t work because it’s impossible to match the new finish to the old and there will be a line where the look of the floor obviously changes.
And, they said, parquet flooring can be a little tricky, so the refinishing probably should be handled by a professional. Simpson said the first thing to determine is if the floors are solid wood parquet or parquet veneer. Solid wood parquet is made up of short strips of wood laid side by side, and the floor is fairly uniform from the surface to the base. Veneer parquet floors, which tend to be older floors, have a thin layer of wood (about 1/16th inch) in a parquet pattern over some kind of base layer. If you’re dealing with a veneer parquet, at most you can only sand it once in the floor’s lifetime. Any more and you sand right through the veneer and expose the backing. Solid wood parquet flooring can be sanded multiple times.
Little said the varying grain patterns in veneer parquet flooring can make them hard to sand properly. Wood should be sanded with the grain, and that’s hard when the orientation of the boards changes every 6 inches. Once the floor has been professionally sanded and resealed, Little said it will be better than new because all the irregularities that can trap dirt will be sanded away.
Simpson said he doesn’t recommend homeowners refinish any floors themselves. Floor-sanding equipment can be cumbersome, and it’s easy to gouge the floor by sanding too deeply at the beginning of the row as you start moving across the floor, he said.
Prices for professional floor refinishing vary between companies and regions, but a ballpark-price range of $3.50 to $5 per square foot will pay for sanding and three coats of polyurethane to seal and protect the wood and give it a lasting shine. Add another $1 per square foot for new stain.