I have an older manufactured home that I will be demolishing and replacing with a new stick built home. The mobile has fairly nice 3/4 t&g hardwood. I am considering reuse. Do you think this is might be worth it.

I've used recycled flooring quite a bit. I’m pretty eco conscious so it's alway's one of my first options.

I've done a few floors and I enjoy it, but I'm an electrician not an installer so my angle on it might not be as production friendly as someone who has to make a buck at it.

I think they can look great if done right. They are cost effective, I took 2000 sq. ft. of maple fooring out of a school we were renovating, and all it cost me was sweat. I got a bunch of fir flooring from demo'ed support beams that were re-milled. ect.

your's won't cost you anything.

The drawbacks are, that they are more labor intensive (cleaning the t&g, squaring the edges, removing nails) and you can't resand them as often. ( but how often are you really going to re-sand your floors anyway)

And at the end of the day you can have something beautiful and you can feel good that you reduced the demand of one of the Earths resources.

Thanks for the reply and advice. I have no problem spending a little sweat and time especially if it will save me a buck. The floor in my home is not all that old. I believe it was new in 2000. Im not entirely sure what species of wood it is, maybe red oak. Im sure that it has only been finished one time. How many times can one expect to be able to sand and refinish a floor ?

That really depends on how aggressively the floor is sanded. You should measure it. My observations are that the top groove on ¾ starts out at about 5/16. After a medium to aggressive sanding you only lose about 1/16.

So you would probably get a few different opinions on this, but I would say 3 or 4 times.

That 100 year old maple is pretty much as thick as it was when it started and this is the first time its being redone. So you be the judge.

A couple of tricks I use are to have a small 4” block to make sure the flooring is similar in thickness, to keep my sanding easier. I also will use tar paper or sheet rock shims to level the floor out as I lay it. (Sometimes I need to router the bottom groove if the t&g is real tight.) The less variance in the height of the boards will make the sanding less aggressive, but that’s true of new floors as well.