Hardwood Floor Repair

If your hardwood floor is in need of serious repair, you can count on us to restore it. We’re Southeast Michigan’s leader in floor repair. We know the toll that time can take on a hardwood floor. Sometimes, stains from pets are too deep to refinish. Water damage is a common issue, and can create the need for repair. Renovations, redecoration, and wall removal can also result in an incomplete or damaged floor. Even with a properly sealed and finished floor, moisture will affect it over time. And that’s where we come in.

Repairs often finish with a full sand and recoat, and that means picking a stain. If you are at that stage, the floor stain color visualizer is worth ten minutes — it puts the color in your room rather than leaving you to guess from a sample board.

Our flooring experts are ready to help, whether you’re paying out of pocket, or through an insurance claim. We are often relied on by architects and interior designers. They trust our expertise in hardwood floor repair and restoration. We’ve worked in many historic homes to repair and refinish hardwood floors.

We source our materials from a wide array of trusted brands. We will remove your damaged boards and replace them with boards of the same species. From there we can refinish the new boards along with the flooring around it to ensure that it will blend with the rest of your floors. Visit our Refinishing Page for more information on that process.

Solid hardwood floors are intended to last a life time with the proper care and maintenance. If your floor is significantly damaged, don’t despair. We have the tools and expertise to make it as good as new again. For an affordable price, you can have beautiful hardwood floors that will last a lifetime.

What actually goes wrong with a hardwood floor

Most repair calls fall into a handful of problems. Knowing which one you have tells you whether this is a half-day job, a board replacement, or something that needs the cause fixed before anyone touches the wood.

Squeaks

A squeak is movement. Either a board is rubbing against its neighbor, or the floor has separated slightly from the subfloor and is flexing against a fastener as you step. It is almost never a finish problem, which is why refinishing a squeaky floor leaves you with a beautiful squeaky floor.

Where there is access from below — an unfinished basement, a crawl space — the fix is usually made from underneath and never shows. Where there is not, we fasten from above and plug the hole so it disappears into the grain. Either way it is a targeted repair, not a reason to redo the room.

Cupping — edges higher than the middle

Cupping means the underside of the boards is wetter than the top. In Michigan that usually traces to a damp basement or crawl space, a humidifier running hard through winter, or a slow leak nobody has found yet.

The moisture source has to be fixed first, and the floor has to be given time to settle. Sanding a cupped floor flat while it is still wet underneath is the single most expensive mistake in this trade: the wood dries, the cup relaxes, and now the board edges are thin and the middle is low — the opposite problem, permanently, with less wood left to fix it. We measure moisture before we quote, and sometimes the honest answer is to come back in a few weeks.

Gaps between boards

Solid oak moves with the seasons, and Michigan gives it a lot to react to. Floors shrink through the heating season and close back up in summer humidity. Gaps that appear in February and disappear in July are normal and should not be filled — filler in a winter gap gets crushed or pushed out when the wood expands again.

Gaps that stay open year-round are a different matter, and those can be filled or the boards replaced depending on width and how many there are.

Pet stains

There are two kinds, and they need different answers. A surface stain sits in the finish and sands out with the rest of the floor. A black stain means urine got through the finish and reacted with the tannins in the oak, and that discoloration often runs the full thickness of the board. Sanding chases it deeper without removing it.

Those boards get replaced. It is a better outcome than sanding a floor thin trying to reach the bottom of a stain that goes all the way through.

Scratches, dents and worn traffic lanes

If the damage is in the finish only, the floor may only need a buff and recoat rather than a full sand — faster, and it does not spend any of the wear layer. If the scratches have gone through to bare wood, or the traffic lanes have worn gray, it is a sanding job. Dents in soft grain can sometimes be steamed back up before finishing.

Water damage and buckling

Buckled boards have lifted clear of the subfloor, which means the bond or the fasteners have failed and the wood has expanded past where it can go. That section needs replacing, and the subfloor underneath needs checking before new wood goes down over a problem that is still there.

Replacing boards so the repair does not show

Individual boards can be cut out and new ones laced into the existing floor. Doing it invisibly is the actual skill: matching species and width, reading grain direction so the replacement does not stand out, and then sanding and finishing the whole area together so old and new wood take the stain as one floor.

Matching an older floor is usually possible. Oak strip flooring was made in a limited set of widths and grades, and where a match is genuinely unavailable we will say so before starting rather than after.

When a repair is not the right answer

Sometimes it is not. A floor already sanded to the top of the fasteners, widespread structural movement, or damage across most of the rooms will all argue for replacement. If that is what we find, we will tell you, and we install new hardwood as well.

Far more often the floor is worth keeping. Before anyone quotes you a tear-out, it is worth having someone measure what is actually left.