Hey all,

First and foremost thank you for the help information contained within this forum.

I'm having a separation issue in two areas of my solid oak floor. I believe the issue is a combination of the board being cut smaller than the other boards with some shrinkage.

Here is a picture of the worst area:



The area picture is in the kitchen. The other area is in the hall bathroom. What can I do to correct this? Its driving me bonkers.

Thanks in advance.

is it peaked up like this /\ or is it flat?

its flat.

May be a subfloor issue... Better pics of he area mayhelp..

Since bth areas are "wet areas" it's feasible to think it mayb hrinkage from water..

Since it looks prefinished, my first question to you would be how the flooring was installed ie, naildown, gluedown or click or gluing the T&G as a floater?

Then substrate type ie, concrete, ply over concrete, vapor retarder or adhesive?

the flooring was nailed. it is on top of plywood above the basement. ill get some more pics of the area, but the two afflicted spots are the kitchen (picture above) and in the bathroom.

I'd love to get these eye sores fixed, especially if we were to move at some point.

Additional Pics as requested:

Kitchen:





Bathroom:

Might be your fastener schedule not being as tight as should be. Hard to say the cause without tearing it up. But tearing it up and redoing it is the only solution I see.
You got a couple shorts in there to close together.

Staple size and or cleat gauge?

Are you sure you nailed every row or did you mistakenly skip row it?

Id say thats where they went from the floor nailer to the finish nailer. Where the cabs in before the install? Might just be where they were swollen up before and now its dry and they have shrunk back down.

You are correct. The cabinets were down before the install as we remodeled the kitchen.

It appears as the fasteners just aren't doing their job now as we were able to reposition the boards. That being said they have not been re-secured as I was waiting to hear the best way to do this.

Should I just take up the boards and re-secure them?

If so, how should we re-secure them since the finish nailer did not work?

Dang Kevin, good call as always.

What is the proper way to go about resecuring the boards?

Do I pull up the boards and then glue and renail using the finish nailer? Something else?

Thanks for your help everyone

My guess is someone used a 18/20 gauge braid nailer to finish up those closing rows. Id pull it out carefully and reinstall using a 15gauge 2" finish nail. the last rows under the toekick are a real pain and normally I glue those in with a few random face nails to hold while the glue sets.