I’d be happy to help out. What can I do-diddily-doodily-diddly-hobbily-hibbily-gobbily-gobbily-gobble-gabba-gabba-hey?
– Ned Flanders
We recently took out a wall in one of the bedrooms to improve access to the closet. Of course, where the wall used to be, the hardwood floor isn’t. Instead, what’s left is a jaggedly edge of hardwood floor ends.
With the wall in place, nobody sees the hardwood edges, so there’s no need to tidy them up.
I came across this situation once before in this house. It was when we were remodeling the kitchen.
The traffic flow through our kitchen used to be horrible, and Stacey and I had some quite spirited discussion about how to change it. The solution was to block off one door, and open up a new door at the other end of the same wall.
In that case, I also had to deal with a jaggedly wooden edge.
We decided to use one solid piece of oak (actually a stair tread) to span the gap between the hardwood floors of the kitchen and dining room.
One piece of oak filling the gap between the kitchen and dining room floors.
The question was: how to cut off the jaggedly edges and leave a nice straight edge for the new piece of wood to butt up against. My solution at that time was to drill a series of 1/8″ holes along a straight line. I drilled the holes as close to each other as possible, without the drill slipping into the previous hole.
This, of course, took quite a lot of holes!
When I’d eventually drilled all the tiny holes, I used a chisel to cut the wood that remained between the holes. After the chisel had done its job, I used a sander to smooth off the rough bits and to straighten out any kinks.
This was a very long and arduous method. So, when I was presented with the same task, only on a longer stretch of floor, I decided to use a different method. This time I’m using the sawzall!
Bedroom floor jaggedly edge partly tidied up. So far, I’ve sawn the part on the left from the foreground to the middle distance (the straight bit).
The task is still not easy or fast, but it is much better than the previous method.
Because the hardwood is, well, hard, the saw blades get hot. So, I’ve been using two blades; I swap them over when the one in the saw overheats.
It’s going to take a while this way, but I’m hoping for good results.
