Old red deal floorboards

Hi there,

I'm doing up an old red brick terraced house and it has red deal floorboards throughout. I sanded the floorboards upstairs and they came up well, and I was hoping to do the same downstairs. However the quality of the floorboards downstairs is a little patchy, lovely floorboards in most parts, but where the hall was (i've just knocked the dividing wall between the hall and living room area to make it open plan,) and under the stairs the boards are either in bad shape or oddly placed.

I was hoping to fix this by laying matching boards in these areas. I thought of taking them from one of the rooms upstairs which I could then replace with pine and possibly carpet. Alternatively I could maybe source boards from a similar terraced house where people have opted for newer flooring.

For an easier life I could go for carpet, but its not really the look I was hoping for and I've come so far with the house that I feel it would be a shame to fall at the last hurdle.

Any advice??? On whether I'm completely mad, whether it would be possible to use the boards from upstairs or on where I might source second hand red deal boards (the old wide ones!)

Thanks,

Laura

You will rarely regret keeping the boards. I would strongly suggest that you try & source these boards. You will probably be able to get them from salvage specialists, or put notices/adverts all over the gaf.

Taking up and relaying boards from another room will produce a certain amount of waste and is probably not the best use of your time. You should have no great difficulty sourcing similar boards from a salvage yard. This will give you an opportunity to select the best boards. If however you need to take up existing boards (for plumbing or electrical work for example) then it may be a smarter move to take up the lot and relay downstairs.

Thanks, I'll get looking. Are there any salvage yards in and around Dublin that you would recommend?

None that I could personally recommend but the Golden Pages should throw up plenty of sources.....

We had a similar problem when we moved into our house. We had a huge woodburner practically in the middle of the living room floor. To make matters worse it was sitting on a bed of concrete. I had to drill all of the concrete out which left a huge hole - c 5ft x 4 ft in the floor. We wanted to varnish the downstairs floors but couldnt readily get matching floorboards (granted we didnt look too hard but we didnt really have the time either). We got a carpenter in and he took floorboards from one of the bedrooms and did a brilliant job matching up the floor downstairs. We knew we were putting carpet upstairs so it wasnt going to be a problem. We get the odd creak now and again from where the new boards went down in the bedroom but other than that it was relatively painless.

Thanks for all the help! Wish me luck!