How To Repair A Gap In A Hardwood Foor

Learn how to set floating floor gaps with a elementary and inexpensive DIY floor gap fixer! Why pay $60 when you tin can brand one for just a few bucks!

Floating Flooring Gaps

If you have laminate or engineered flooring, there's a good chance you've seen gaps develop between some of your planks. Lord knows we have! They started appearing after our first year in this firm, and they've been growing steadily ever since.

large end gap in an engineered wood floor

All laminate flooring and some engineered wood flooring (like ours) are floating floors. This ways that the floorboards are not nailed, glued or stapled to the subfloor. Rather, the whole floor acts equally an enormous jigsaw puzzle that lies on top of the subfloor below but is non in whatever way attached to it. Floating flooring installation is also ideal when installing new laminate, engineered or luxury vinyl flooring (LVF) over an existing flooring, similar ours that sits atop an older tile floor.

Floating floors are designed to allow for the seasonal expansion and contraction of the flooring planks. Just what happens when there'south just too much contraction?

In our instance, all of the floor gaps coincide with the main HVAC duct that runs only beneath the subfloor. This run of flooring must get even hotter and drier in the winter than anywhere else in the firm.

As these gaps grew over the years, nosotros started to retrieve that nosotros may demand to replace the whole floor.

As you can guess, that idea didn't sit well with either of us, and then I took to the internet for a solution.

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How to Fix Floating Floor Gaps

I learned almost immediately that nosotros weren't alone.

That fabricated me feel meliorate!

And so I found a production made specifically for our trouble. It'southward chosen the Flooring Gap Logroller – an aluminum cake with a sticky substance on one side. It likewise comes with a cheap rubber mallet. All this for $60 on Amazon or $50 from their website.

The idea is that y'all stick the floor gap logroller on the board that has a gap at the end and wack it with the mallet. This closes i gap and opens upwards another behind it. You then close that gap, and the next, and the next until you've hidden the gap behind the nearest baseboard.

How to Make a DIY Floor Gap Logroller

It's so unproblematic, but the product really seemed like a ripoff considering what you got. I already own several prophylactic mallets, and then I didn't need their cheap one.

As for the metal cake, I could duplicate that with a piece of 4 x iv lumber and make my own DIY floor gap fixer. I accept tons of information technology in the basement.

And the gluey stuff? I figured some extreme force double-sided tape would do the trick.

4x4, rubber mallet, double-sided tape and scissors on a table

I sanded one side of my DIY floor gap fixer with 150 grit sandpaper so the tape would become a good grip on it.

To clean or not to clean earlier using the DIY floor gap fixer?

I had seen some talk online of cleaning the floors first with a window cleaner or ammonia, so I'll tell you my experience with both cleaning and not cleaning first.

When I cleaned the floors beginning, the double-sided tape bonded more strongly to the floor than it did to the DIY floor gap fixer. This made it hard to remove the block from the flooring, it and required me to scrape the tape from the floor with my fingers.

It as well meant that I had to use new record for each gap. Not only was that time-consuming, only for a lot of gaps on a big flooring, the price would offset to creep upward. Even so, it would notwithstanding exist cheaper than buying one, just why waste matter money?

When I didn't clean the floors, my DIY floor gap filler had more enough grip to get the job done, and removing the cake was a breeze. I was able to close several gaps before the stickiness finally gave out and required me to change the tape.

As you can encounter, we had some big, honkin' gaps! That's a three/viii inch gap. Handan most fell in the other day! 🙂