In his own home, Ron had recently widened a doorway and then installed beautiful French doors. He was pleased with the way the project turned out, but there was a little repair work left to do. When he removed a portion of the wall, he had to put in several new strips of flooring. This left him with two problems: the strips were slightly higher than the surrounding floor and they were unfinished. Ron needed to level the floor and then match the color of the finish.
Click
Here For a list of what you will need in order to complete
this project.
View Full Video Segement on How
to Match the Finish on a Hardwood Floor Patch
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1. Scrape wood
A paint scraper, when properly prepared, can do a great job of removing thin layers of wood. In this case, properly prepared means ensuring that the scraper has a really sharp edge.
Take the paint scraper, place it in a vice, and tighten it. Use a ten or twelve-inch mill file and pass the file along the edge of the blade.
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| If you look very closely, you will see how shiny the scraper blade becomes all the way across. That means you have a very sharp edge from one side all the way over to the other.
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| It's best to start in the middle where there's a bit of a ridge. If it is working right, you should see small amounts of wood peeling off the floor. You want to actually be cutting through the wood fibers, almost like a plane.
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| After a substantial amount of the wood has been removed, you may need to switch to a narrower scraper with a carbide tip. This tool never needs sharpening and it works well for getting up into tight spots and provides you with more precise control.
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2. Sand wood
Once you have gone as far as you can with the scraper, use a random orbital sander to complete the job. This is a fairly aggressive sander and is good for smoothing everything off. When sanding, be very careful only to sand right up to the edge of the existing plank that you are trying to match.
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3. Apply wood filler
Use wood filler to fill the exposed nail holes. Also fill any areas where there are very small gaps.
Use enough wood filler to slightly overfill each crack or hole. The excess will then need to be sanded off. Use a vibrating palm sander with 100-grit paper for the final smoothing.
To remove any dust on the surface, first use a vacuum, and then use a sticky tack cloth made just for this purpose.
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4. Apply finish
Once your surface is clean, smooth and dust free, it is time to apply a finish. The tricky part is determining the right color to use.
It is a challenge to match a floor when you don't know what finish was used on the existing floor. If you assume that the floors have a clear coating on them you can do is a simple test to get an idea of what the wood might look like with a clear finish on it.
To do this, put either water or alcohol on the wood and wet it temporarily. Alcohol is probably a better choice only because it evaporates very quickly. With the wet alcohol on the wood, you can usually get a pretty good idea of what a clear coat would look like.
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| After applying the alcohol, if the new wood is a little lighter or less yellow than the adjacent planks, then you will need to adjust the color by brushing on some shellac that has been thinned with denatured alcohol.
If the color does not look right, you can wipe off a bit of the shellac while it's still wet. After the color is just right, apply a clear polyurethane coating. This might impart just a touch of color, but probably not very much. You also may want to consider if the existing floors are high gloss or semi-gloss, and try to match the sheen as well.
Once you have successfully matched the finish, no one will ever know which boards are the new arrivals.
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