Decades ago, when the owners of the house retrofitted it with electric, rather than tear out the laths and plaster, they cut out the tongues of the floor boards and pulled them up.  FUCKERS!  Now we have to replace those boards, but with what?

A few weeks ago we replaced the bathroom floor with 3/4″ plywood.  We saved the boards we pulled up.  Most of them are in rough shape be it termites or water damage, but that’s all we had.

We started by replacing boards with matching width donors.  They went in easy enough, but seemed to have huge gaps.  It was really a let down as a first impression.  What do we do next?

Once we cleaned all the dirt, plaster and paint from all the other gaps in the floor, we realized that these 1/8″ gaps were pretty standard.  With the doubts behind us, we forged on.  We managed to replace all the boards we had matches for.

To get down to a few final boards our friend Ian was kind enough to lend us his table saw so we could cut down some boards and add a groove so they would fit better.  This gave us enough certainty that we could move along with installing the PEX under the floors.

We still have one more floor board to go.  We’ve scoured Second Chance, a local architectural salvage company, but found no 7/8″ pine wide enough.  Might need to make it from new wood.