Hey Folks,

A big thank you in advance for sharing your experience and knowledge with me. I live in a house built in the mid 50's. The hardwood floors in the living room were last refinished at least 25+ years ago. They were in real rough shape.

So in October I undertook the project on my own. Rented all the big shiny equipment from Home Depot and tackled the project. The finish on the floors was amazingly hard and it took alot more work to sand off the old finish than I expected.

Once I got all the old finish off, I went a little off the normal refinishing and I stained the entire floor an antique green. I put on 3 coats of water based stain and let them sit for 24 hours.

I then applied the Varathane Diamond Semi-gloss polyurethane. I proceeded to apply 4 coats over a 48 hour period.

I live in Los Angeles. Now months after refinishing the floors I am getting shrinkage throughout the room. The boards are shrinking and there are gaps opening up between boards both length wise and width wise. Since the floors are a mint green color these gaps are quite noticeable.

So my questions are.....
1) Did I do anything wrong ?
2) What is happening and why ?
3) Will it stop at some point and will I be able to fill in the gaps and then restain ?


Thanks again -

Dave

Sounds like your normal seasonal shrinkage. You probably didn't notice it before. Leave it alone until summer comes when it is higher rh it should go back to normal. Or get a stand alone humidifier.

I am not sure if the humidity is such an issue. I am in the San Fernando Valley, so I am no in a high humidity area. Also there is a 400 gallon open top aquarium in the room, which evaporates out quite a bit of water on a daily basis.

The only way to tell is get a quality thermo-hygrometer.

Stephen is right. If the floors have been down 50-60 years they wouldn't start warping just because you refinished them. And you haven't described warping, gaps mean shrinking from loss of humidity. You probably already had them but since the floor if lighter, and cleaner they are just showing up more, not to mention you are looking at it more.

Be nice to have a sticky on the subject here.......uh hum....admin

You need to add some humidity if your aquarium is loosing water its too dry in there.

Well the aquarium is not a static loss. The aquarium has 1600+ watts of metal halide lighting. It has excessive surface agitation. It has fans blowing across the surface to aid in evaporative cooling. So environment is not pulling water out of the tank, as much as the tank is adding humidity to the environment. The downstairs of the house is just under 2000 sq feet, and the room in question is about 550 sq feet in the center of a fairly open floor plan. I have an updated HVAC system that keeps the downstairs at 72 in the winter and 78 in the summer (to keep the aquarium temp stable).

So from the comments posted, it seems that this is a shrinkage issue. It just seems strange that the boards would be shrinking in the winter time.

I have two other rooms that have the same wood flooring. They were last resurfaced about 4 years ago (just a buffing and a couple of coats of poly). They are natural (no stain) I went and looked closely at that floor and didn't find any gaps in that area of flooring. Althought I did find a termite pile !!

Thanks for the help folks.

Dave

Dude, having surface water that small is not at all like having a humidifier, Sure it helps, but just about like the amount of water human beings add to the relative humidity of a house in showering and cleaning. It's just not all that much.

I had a client who had a 8' x 8' Koy pond in the middle of her house and the rh was still low in the winter

Born and raised in the San Fernando Valley,(43 years ). Large RH swings are common from winter to summer. Running the air conditioning in the summer, and heat in the winter adds to the seasonal swings out there.

The only reason a floor will gap is because it shrank. Wood only shrinks in dimensions, is because it lost the moisture it had at one time.

Come summer, or the exact time of year it was refinished, the gaps should be back to the way you remember them.

Winter is crack and gap season for wood floors.