Q: Our home was built in 1965. It has some amazing peg hardwood flooring throughout the house. (70% of the flooring is this). The problem is the Den, Breakfast Nook, and Hallway sub flooring all have grooves due to age and weathering. The crawl space under the home is right below these areas. How can I go about taking this up with minimal damage to replace the sub flooring and then reinstall it? Can I salvage the peg hole fillers or will I need to cut new fillers and refinish the flooring? From what I can tell this will be a very long project if I do it myself. Should I try this or get a professional? I’ve done several tile projects as well as putting down hardwood flooring but this might do me in.
Thanks,
Steve
A: Let’s go into some of the history of pegged floors before we get directly to removing the current floor. Many floors have the pegged look from the mid to late 60′s up through the 80′s. True pegged floors typically are a width of 7″ or more. These boards were drilled somewhat to make a recess for face nailing, then pegged with a dowel to fill the recess. After the peg’s adhesive had cured, you then would sand and site (also called Swedish) finish the floor. The reason for this technique is that wide boards over time will rise a bit. Improvements in milling since the old days (back when all floors were scraped on site to smooth them, then finished after installation) have prevent the necessity for pegging floors, but the look itself was popular from the 60′s through the 80′s.
Alright, let’s get out of history mode. More than likely your floor is one where the pegs are there purely for appearance and not to cover face nailing. In this case the floor should be nailed through the tongue at a 45 degree angle. Pulling a few boards carefully should show this to be true. Removing these boards is simply a matter of patience and evenly applying leverage across the length of your board (even movement should prevent and splintering). Here you will just need a pry bar and some patience. When this floor was new it was likely a prefinished product with an oil based finish, so you will want to at least screen and recoat the floor after reinstalling it.
When removing the boards, number them with a pencil on the back and bundle them accordingly to help keep the boards organized so it makes reinstalling them easier. In the case that your floor is truly face nailed, similar even leverage will need to be applied to remove them, but in order to reinstall them you will most likely be forced to remove the current pegs, remove the nails and use new nails to anchor the floor, then peg, sand and finish the floor.
If you want to make sure the floor is taken up carefully, it may be best to have a professional do the work for you, but make sure you find someone experienced in pegged flooring and who has reclaimed flooring in the past to ensure the floor is taken up properly.
