When you move a wall, you'll leave a gap in the wood floors. This can be repaired without installing an entirely new floor. The repaired section should blend perfectly with the remaining refinished floor. No one should be able to tell the difference. If they do, you have defeated your purpose.

During the course of home remodeling, you may be removing walls in areas that have hardwood floors. When you do, you'll see the subfloor where the wall once stood. Obviously, you will have to replace and repair the individual floor planks and then refinish the floors when your home remodeling project is almost done. When we say repair and refinish, we mean that the repaired section blends perfectly with the existing refinished floor and no one can tell the difference.

Repair the Affected Areas
In our remodeling project we removed several walls of a TV room to create a master bedroom and master bathroom area. We also removed some walls in our foyer area. You can see the parts that were removed. That meant repairing the hard wood floors or tearing everything out and installing new flooring.

Most hardwood floors specialists can repair the floor without anyone knowing the difference after it is refinished. However, when they are actually doing the repair, the floors look very ugly. The racket and noise from the repair activity is very nerve wracking also. The key thing is to make sure that who ever does the repairs uses hardwood planks that are the same wood species as your existing floor. Our original repair guys started to use red oak until we told them that we had white oak. So just specify the species of wood that should be used and you will be fine.


Tear Out and Replace the Entire Floor
If you are doing a major rework of the house and are knocking down many walls, then seriously consider tearing out all of the hardwood floors and installing new ones. This may seem like overkill, but in the end it is just much easier to install a new hardwood floor then to make 10-15 repairs.

If you are going to tear out the existing hardwood floors, call up several hardwood floor companies and ask them if they want the flooring. In the Washington DC area, many hardwood floor shops will gladly remove it for you, especially if the wood is old and hard to find.

How about the Walls?
One contractor that we know recommends that clients tear out the hardwood floors and existing walls when doing major whole house remodeling. Again this may seem counter intuitive. However, when you watch a HVAC specialist, plumber and electrician working with existing walls, you will quickly see that it's time consuming and expensive. With new framing, the tradesmen can easily get their respective jobs completed and everything will be up to code as well.