Replies

1. 
   Ben_Howe | Sep 09, 1999 07:56pm | #14

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   I've pulled up many ft of pine flooring...rip out a course and scrap it then put a cutting wheel in a grinder and crawl along cutting the nails (wear your knee pads). The boards lift out with NO damage to the tongues. You will praise your extra few minutes of tear out time when you go to put it back together

2. 
   Guest_ | Sep 09, 1999 07:56pm | #15

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   I have salavged 2200 square feet of #1 maple 3/4" x 2-1/4" tounge and groove strip flooring from an old roller rink. Before I use it (I'm putting it in my remodeled house) I need to clean the tounges and grooves. They have quite a bit of built-up dirt, etc. I'm thinking of using a flap sander attached to a drill or drill press or spindle sander and running the boards through this. Somehow I don't think re-routing or re-milling the edges will work. Any ideas? I do plan to wait to clean the top surface as part of the general re-sanding/re-finishing process after the floor is laid.

1. 
   Guest_ | Sep 03, 1999 08:50pm | #1

   *Try a wire brush on a drill or mini grinder. Just don't push too hard, let the brush do the work.John

1. 
   Guest_ | Sep 04, 1999 12:41am | #2

   *Try taking a couple of cabinet scrapers and grind and file profiles to fit the tongue and groove.

1. 
   Guest_ | Sep 04, 1999 01:01am | #3

   *Did the same thing 15 years ago with Maple flooring I took out of an old school. I cleaned the dirt the best I could with putty knives and a dull chisel. The really bad stuff, I didn't use. I like jcallahan's idea of a shaped scraper. Maple really moves with seasonal moisture changes. If I had it to do over I would bring the wood inside and let it acclimate to the driest season before installing it. Of course, then I guess it would tend to buckle as it swells. Either way, your gonna have some pretty wide gaps in your dry season. But I wouldn't trade my Maple for Oak . I love it. - jb

1. 
   Guest_ | Sep 05, 1999 08:04am | #4

   *I just got a post from another discussion board that suggests NOT cleaning the T&Gs, that the boards will go togther anyway and just as well. I'm skeptical but curious. Would appreciate your thoughts. This is nice wood, from a mill in Michigan sometime in the 1930s. We also pulled up the fir sub-floor and the fir joist system. --rgh

2. 
   Guest_ | Sep 05, 1999 09:30am | #5

   *I'm not gonna say whoever gave you that advice is wrong, but they're wrong. Sure the boards with go down nice and tight, but how are you ever gonna get that black dirt out from between the boards? I had literally thousands of feet to pick from, so like I said, I just culled the really bad ones. Buit if you're tight for material, clean it up the best you can. That floor will be down a long time, and the little extra time you invest now, you'll be glad you did when you look at it next year. - jb

3. 
   Guest_ | Sep 05, 1999 06:40pm | #6

   *I believe you are right; I have about 25% extra, enough for waste and to be picky. I'm in Utah where, due to the low humidity, the seasonal movement of the wood should be less. I'm going to buy the Bostitch pneumatic floor stapler, take my time, and sell it when I'm done. Thanks for your help. --rgh

4. 
   Guest_ | Sep 05, 1999 08:12pm | #7

   *Man, there is some beautiful country in Utah.

5. 
   Guest_ | Sep 07, 1999 01:38am | #8

   *How about furniture stripper on the tounge and groove? I recently salvaged about 900 sq ft of old gym floor from an old school, probably installed in the early 1900's. There are some beautiful pieces of birdseye and curly maple in the mix. I made a couple of profile scrapers out of old putty knives and used a good grade of furniture stripper applied to the tounge and groove and it softened up the old layers of varnish and dirt enough for me to remove them with a little bit of elbow grease. The only thing you have to be carefull of is nicking the top surface of the flooring. It's long tedious work, but the end result is well worth it! When you complete a few boards, use a thin bodied stripper on a scrub pad to remove the little bits you missed.

6. 
   Carlos_ | Sep 07, 1999 05:56am | #9

   *So how bad a job was it to get the flooring up? How long did it take and how did you do it?

7. 
   Guest_ | Sep 07, 1999 08:02am | #10

   *rg,I would vote for setting up the router table or shaper and cutting a new T&G. You wouldn't have toremove more than maybe a 1/16 to clean them up. Besure you got all the nail pieces out.That's what I would do.Ed. Williams

8. 
   Guest_ | Sep 07, 1999 09:05am | #11

   *carlos - Some of the rooms came up easier than others, but none of it was too bad. I determined which edge had the tongue and took a heavy bar and pried out a couple boards without regard for saving them. Then I would get under the tongue of the first board I could with a 48" crow bar and work along prying, until it lifted. Then repeat with next course. In 2 days I removed 5 maybe 6 thousand square feet. Had teenagers loading it in my van, pick up truck and a long U Haul trailer I rented. That was on a Sat and Sun. Monday my buddy, who turned me on to it in the first place, started demolition on the building with a ball. - jb

9. 
   Guest_ | Sep 07, 1999 08:21pm | #12

   *My wife and I used roughly the same technique as "crazy legs" did, except that we ended up using "wonder bars," those 12-inch wide prybars with a 90-degree-turn, flat blade on one end. We picked a line along one wall and sawed through the width of the maple, then proceeded to destroy one or two boards before beginning the prying-up sequence. As I recall we would pry up the groove side, so that the tounge would work its way out of the succeeding groove. It took us alot longer than crazy legs. To get 2,000 square feet took probably forty hours total (spaced out over a couple of weeks--we got lucky and got a reprieve from the demolition people). We only consider ourselves "enlightened amateurs," but I was amazed at how quickly we caught on to pulling this stuff up. We tried a variety of different crow bars and pullers--the wonder bars just worked best for us. I do recall sharpening the blades--this made it easier to pry. We also had high school kids pulling nails, banding ten boards at a time (since we have stored the boards for about two years, this kept them nice and straight), and loading them on my pickup truck. THE BONUS was realizing we had beautiful t&g doug fir underneath as the subfloor, which we pulled up, too--and have been using that for all our trim and cabinet work. It has that "distressed" look that people pay big bucks for. I imagine we pulled up about 2500 square feet of this. THEN, we pulled up the doug fir joist system underneath this. Beautiful wood, still straight as can be. You don't see this stuff any more. A lumber man estimated this pile as worth 2 or 3 thousand . . . (I'm going to used this for my stair railings, etc.) In and among the joists we even found a few of the old 14" x 22" posters announcing the opening of the roller rink, (I'm guessing back in the mid-thirties), one of which we will frame and hang on the wall when we are finished with our remodeling. I even have, sketched in pencil on a couple of the fir sub-floor planks and next to several cigarette burns where the workmen paused to do a little figuring, two rough plans for,one of which became the actual floor pattern. I believe you would call it the "log cabin" pattern. --rgh

10. 
    Guest_ | Sep 08, 1999 02:00am | #13

    *rg - That's a great story. About a month after we got all that Maple, the same buddy called and said they were going to tear down an old school gym and did I want the floor? So I go down there with high hopes that turned even higher when I discovered it was an old VG Fir (have to bow my head when I say that) floor. I couldn't manage to get the boards up without splitting them though. They were just too dry. I guess I might have been able to drive the nails all the way through the tongues, but I didn't. When we built our house I used some real old Fir 3 X 14 for rafters in our bedroom 48"o.c., leaving the bottom 5" exposed, with Cedar paneling in between. I got those out of an old office building I remodeled in downtown Tacoma. Love that old lumber, really adds character. - jb