DIY parquet repair

Parquet is a beautiful, durable, practical and very prestigious floor covering. With proper care, parquet will last decades for owners. But, unfortunately, sometimes the coating requires repair. A major repair of the floor with your own hands and without special skills is hardly possible. As regards the elimination of minor defects, this task is quite solvable. Here we will deal with this in this article.

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When to contact specialists?

There are a number of cases when you definitely need to contact professional masters:

• Strong wear of the parquet with a thick layer of varnish, noticeable cracks and hollows. It is possible that there is no need to replace the flooring, but hinging and restoration are definitely needed.
• Parquet boards swelled from getting wet or lagged behind the base. You can restore such parquet, but it is better to entrust such a difficult job to professionals.
• The wood has loosened and darkened, there are traces of damage by decay and mold. Rotten parquet must be completely replaced. It is advisable that the masters do this.

In all these cases, the help of specialists will be required, since the work ahead is voluminous, requiring special knowledge and equipment. If nevertheless you decide to do it yourself read our recommendations:

1. Wood flooring.
2. What type of grinder is suitable for scraping the floor?.

Important! If the restoration of the flooring is timed to the repair in the apartment, then it is advisable to do this after all other work has been completed.

Consider several options for the restoration of parquet with your own hands.

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Chewing gum stuck

Plasticine or chewing gum glued to the floor is a real problem. The mistake of many housewives is the use of a solvent. This can not be done in any case. Traces of chewing gum may not remain, but there is nothing to remove the stain on the surface of the floor.

The following helps to get rid of chewing gum or plasticine on the floor:

1. Pour ice cubes into a plastic bag and place in place of contamination.
2. After 10-15 minutes, clean the chewing gum with a spatula.

No traces left.

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Scratch

If small damage has formed on the surface of the parquet, then you can cope with them without releasing the room from furniture:

1. Clean the floor from varnish, and then get rid of the defect with cosmetic putty.
2. After the putty is completely dry, rub it with a sandpaper, scratch the fakes.
3. The final touch - varnish the surface in two layers. Each of the layers should dry. In order for everything to go smoothly, use the tipswhat to choose a varnish for parquet.

Important! Minor scratches can be fixed with a repair kit. It includes a pencil that paints over individual small defects.

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Cracks

They are formed from the drying of the parquet dice. If the wood has not rotted and is not affected by mold, then it can be completely restored. You can get rid of single slots using the algorithm described above:

1. Cleaning the surface of the parquet.
2. Putty.
3. Scratching a fake.
4. Covering the floor with varnish.

Important! Repairing the flooring is very troublesome and it is necessary to adhere to the technology. In order not to be mistaken in such a situation, use the recommendations onhow to paint parquet.

If the width of the gap exceeds 5 mm and there are many of them, they use such a technique that DIY repair of the parquet gives a good result:

1. Warm the problematic area with a building hair dryer. If you smell mastic or putty, the parquet is ready for further processing.
2. Using a rubber mallet and a rule hook, pull the dies one to the other. As a result, one big gap is obtained.
3. Put a wood rivet (flush with the floor surface) into the gap created by the putty.
4. Further processing of the floor is carried out according to the already described algorithm with cleaning, puttying, designation of false joints, grinding and applying varnish in 2 layers.

Important! It is more difficult if the dies are laid “herringbone”. In this case, you will have to individually repair each gap. Small slivers or shavings can serve as rivets.

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Parquet shook

How to restore parquet with your own hands if individual boards are loose? Separate parquet boards are fixed by nailing to neighboring ones with the help of small cloves. Hammer nails at 45 degrees, on the greater side of the die. Drown the hat in a tree, and then putty it, sand it and coat it with varnish.

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Paul creaks

For parquet floors, this is one of the most common problems. The creak may be caused by mistakes made during laying of the coating, or natural aging of the material.

Important! The easiest way is to eliminate the creak if the dies are laid by the masters on the bitumen mastic. It is much more difficult if layers were laid by laymen. In this case, screed can help.

The procedure is as follows:

1. Measure the humidity level in the room. The optimal moisture level is 40%, the maximum is 60%.
2. Remove the skirting boards and check the condition of the spacer wedges. If the floor creaks, then the expansion wedge most likely lies inside the cracked gap and, of course, bursts nothing.
3. If construction foam was used instead of the expansion wedge, then remove it using the chisel.
4. Replace old wedges with new ones.
5. Knock down the wedges daily until the creak is completely gone.

Important! If these measures were ineffective, this suggests that the flooring is completely worn out and must be replaced. If floor repair is not planned in the near future, cover the floor with plywood on a waterproofing basis or on thickly wiped inorganic paint (red, white).

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Floor swelling

As a rule, the floor swells from a large amount of water. You can fix this problem yourself only if a small area of ​​the floor is damaged. How to repair a parquet floor with your own hands if it swollen from the water? The procedure in this case is as follows:

1. Warm the problematic area of ​​the floor using a construction hairdryer. A good sign is if there is a smell of parquet mastic.
2. Until the surface has time to cool, cover it with burlap and put on top the load per 1 m2 - 10 kg. To do this, you can use a basin filled with water, a kettlebell, or a three-liter bottle, again, filled with water.
3. Maintain coverage for at least one day. If the swelling has decreased, repeat the whole algorithm again.

Important! In order for this event to succeed, you need the right equipment. This will help you our rating of the best building hair dryers.

If the measures were unsuccessful, then the floor, alas, cannot be repaired and the damaged dies will have to be replaced.

Important! If the floor is swollen, then you need to start solving the problem immediately, no later than a week after swelling has occurred. After a week, the fungus begins to develop, and the dies affected by it must be replaced.

Processing technology depends on the type of wood from which the boards are made:

• If it is a straight wood (oak, walnut), then moisten the boards slightly before repair.Cover the area to be repaired with a damp cloth and leave to dry completely.
• If the wood is small-sized (beech, birch, exotic tree species), then dry the parquet thoroughly before repair.

Important! To avoid problems read how to remove the floor with your own hands.

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Home Master Tips

Before you restore the old parquet with your own hands, you need to master 4 operations:

• Preparation of tinted putty, its use.
• Drawing fake joints.
• Floor cycling using manual cycles.
• Grinding.

Putty

In construction stores, there are various restoration pastes for parquet coating. However, there is an opportunity for self-preparation of putty mixture:

1. Saw off the sawdust from the parquet of the same tree that you have laid.
2. Mix them with varnish.

Important! The resulting putty has a creamy consistency. It is great for repairing potholes, seams and other minor damage. The proportion between the volumes of sawdust and epoxy varnish is 1: 4. If you are making epoxy putty, it resembles plasticine in consistency.

Fake

This is an imitation of the junction between parquet floors. A false joint helps to make the repair site invisible. It is best to use a metal line of metal and an awl. The procedure in this case is as follows:

• Make sure that the putty is partially frozen and consistently resembled jelly.

Important! Alkyd and uralkyd putties harden in a few minutes, so you need to prepare everything you need in advance.

• Having outlined the proposed line for connecting parquet dies, lay a metal ruler and draw a straight line with the awl of the desired length.
• If the false joint should be non-linear, then use the metal ruler by bending it. Draw a line with light pressure on the ruler.

Hand cycle application

This is a rather complicated and laborious work. You can loop a small area manually. Cycles are sold in hardware stores.

Important! You can make a cycle yourself from a plane blade. It only needs to be bent and hardened.

Foot grinding

Grinding the floor with your feet is more convenient than manual. Attach the sandpaper to the soles of old flat shoes. Moreover, coarser is glued on one shoe, and a fine-grained skin on the other. One leg, thus, performs rough grinding, and the other - the finish. Of course, the method is quite time-consuming, but working is much easier than with your hands.

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Stock footage

Using the tips given in the article, you can perform a small repair of the flooring yourself. Do not forget to carefully care for the flooring, and it will serve you for many years!