I am installing some tongue and groove hardwood flooring – white oak, 2.25” wide, into a large room in which there is already 50 year old white oak installed. The two areas in which I am installing the new flooring into – where there was not previously t & g flooring, is a newly remolded kitchen in our home and also I modified a stair well and built a new floor to cover up part of where the old stairway was – so I need to floor that area as well. This is all really one huge room in front of the house – dining area, stairwell and adjoining kitchen with no walls.

So anyway the problem is this – first of all I don't want the three areas – the areas of the existing flooring and the new flooring to have margins where all the ends of the new boards in the two new areas butt up against the old boards end to end. In other words I want to interlace the old boards with the new boards so it looks as much as possible as if the floor was installed all as one job, rather than cobbled up with three separate patches where for several runs of boards there is a distinch line of new boards butting up against old boards. In other words no thresholds or borders where old boards meet new boards, just new boards interlaced with old boards randomly as this was all one job.

So I went ahead and for the border where the new boards will meet the old boards, I removed every other board back a ways with my Fein multimaster, made the lengths random, and also cut the old board ends which met the threshold back a bit as well, and randomized their lengths where they previously ended – they were butted into a threshold where the kitchen starts. So now where the margins are, all the lengths of the old boards are random. I used my fein instead of going all the way back to each boards end because some of my old flooring boards are very long and pretty and I did not want to waste much of the old flooring.

The second issue is – where the new floor I just built to cover up the stairwell meets the existing flooring, the tongues of the existing flooring is facing away from the new floor, so the only way I can install the new flooring on the newly built floor such that the flooring nail gun can get at the tongue side of new boards AND so the new board line is butted up against the first old board, is to butt the grooved sides of the first new board run, against the grooved side of the adjoining old board, and have the the first board's tongue pointing in the opposite direction of the old existing board's tongue. So basically I will have two boards which meet groove to groove, and are not supporting each other on one edge with a tongue and groove connection. So I assume I will have to shim this first board out.

And because of this problem, for the interlaced boards, when I try to interlace them, I am trying to slide in new boards between old boards, with tongues and tongues meeting, and grooves and grooves meeting – in the interlaced areas.

So how would I solve this problem?

Should I cut off the tongues of the old boards where they are interlaced with the new boards, and shim out the new boards so they are flush with the old boards? Or is there a better way to do this?

Thanks for any advice.

If this is a 3/4 inch product, and you dont have too far to go (im talking about the stair area) then I would lay the boards "backwards". That is I would hand nail the floor through the groove side, setting the nail with a nail set so it doesnt interfere with the tongue of the next board. You would also want to suppliment the nailing with a urethane adhesive.

Thanks much,

I have 45 inches to go - yes it's 3/4 inch.

I did try last week nailing the first board in backward through the groove side, problem was, the nail stuck out so far out of the groove, I had to try using a nail set and push the nail in further, and the nails that my manual floor nailer uses do not want to budge that much - and make it hard for the boards to close the gap. They bend too easily when I try to set them into the groove after using the flooring nailer. I'm using one of those manual flooring nail guns from Home Depot rental - the ones with the mallet.

Well you are just gonna have to go back in time to the good old days of hand nailing. Use 2 inch finishing naiils, either ardox or smooth shank, the smooth nail will have less tendency to bend and floors were nailed that way for a hundred years so dont fret too much about their holding power. If you were to pre-drill with a 1 1/2 inch finishing nail in your drill, (smaller gauge than the 2 inch) the wood will have less tendency to split, and one or two nails will stay sharp enough to do the job and cost a penny, compared to the number of drill bits you would break on the same job.