How to Patch a Wood Floor

To make the patches in strip flooring blend in, you’ll need to pull them up and weave in new strips between the old ones. The goal is to cut out some of the old strips so that the joints in adjacent courses are staggered, matching the existing joint pattern. But first, you’ll need to obtain new tongue-and-groove strips of the same width and thickness as the rest of the floor and some subflooring of the same thickness to support the unstable areas. Check out our guide on how to remove and replace tongue and groove flooring.

You can complete this repair with some basic hand tools and a sharp chisel, but the process will go much faster and more smoothly with power tools like the ones I’m using here. An oscillating multitool, a circular saw, a table saw, and a brad nailer will all prove useful. A compressor-powered flooring nailer ensures that the joints will be tight. Many of these tools are available at tool-rental centers if you don’t already own them.

Learn More: How to Protect Wood Floors

Steps for Patching a Wood Floor

The steps covered here may vary, depending on your repair, but once you’re finished, plan to have the entire floor sanded down and given a fresh new finish. Then any differences between the old flooring and the new should be unnoticeable.

Pro Tip: When sourcing wood for a patch, veteran floor refinisher David Dupee recommends harvesting strips from the same floor—”robbing Peter to pay Paul,” as he puts it—because new wood doesn’t stain the same as old, well-dried planks. Closet floors and small hallways slated for other repairs are ideal places to pilfer matching boards.

Step 1: Cut along the floor perimeter

• In the area that you want to patch, use an oscillating multitool with a metal-cutting blade to make thin, vertical cuts through the flooring right next to walls.

Step 2: Pry up loose boards

• A hammer with a straight claw, in combination with pry bars, will lift the loose flooring from the patched area. If you can’t loosen and pull the angled nails from the tongue side of the floorboards, cut through them with the multitool.

Pro Tip: Many nails will remain in the strips as they come up. Pull them out from the back side of the strip with a pair of nippers. Don’t hammer a nail out through the face—its head can splinter the wood and ruin the strip.

When prying up boards, lever the hammer’s head against a discarded piece of wood so as not to scratch the surrounding floor. Once all the damaged boards are removed, use a scraper to clean off the exposed tongue of any adjacent board that will remain in place, removing caked-on dirt and dried glue that could prevent it from fitting snugly in the groove of a new strip. Any fasteners left behind in the subfloor that you can’t free up should be hammered flush with the surface of the subfloor.

Step 3: Install subflooring

Tip: Using Splines

When flooring nailers drive angled nails, they also force the wood strips tightly against one another. But if there isn’t enough wall clearance to use a nailer in one direction, you can get tight joints by turning the nailer 180 degrees and nailing in the opposite direction.

To do this, first slip long wood splines (A), cut on a table saw, into opposing grooves (B). Then nail the tongues of the reversed strips as usual.

• Cover flooring holes, like this one left by a floor register, with plywood or oriented strand board of the same thickness as the existing subflooring.
• Square up the opening with a circular saw, then cut the subfloor pieces to fit.
• Screw the new panels to floor joists, or to cleats fastened to the joists.

Pro Tip: Tom Silva, This Old House general contractor, recommends using only ¾-inch tongue-and-groove plywood for subflooring: “Pieces of this size create fewer seams; the fewer seams there are the more secure the floor. The interlocking joints are stronger, and the thick boards are less susceptible to splitting between joists.”

Learn More: How to Repair a Cracked Floor Joist

Step 4: Create the staggered pattern

• Select the strips in the existing floor that need to be removed in order to stagger the joints.
• First, make a cut down the center of the strip with a circular saw set to the same depth as the strip’s thickness.
• Next, make straight, square end cuts with the multitool (as shown). Then you can pry up the cut sections and vacuum up the debris.

Step 5: Install the new strips

• Cover the exposed floor with a moisture barrier or builder’s felt.
• Line up the tongues of the new flooring with the grooves of the old flooring, and tap the new strips between the existing ones.

Pro Tip: Joe Scerri, a flooring contractor with 30 years of experience, finds the joists underneath the subfloor by peering through gaps between the planks, then marks their locations with masking tape on the finish flooring. “If I can nail into the joists as well as every 4 to 6 inches into the subfloor, I’ll have a more stable bond,” he says. He toenails a 2-inch barbed cleat through the tongue at a 45-degree angle, which keeps it from protruding on the underside and inhibiting the fit of the next board.

Step 6: Nail in place

• Using a pneumatic flooring nailer, drive angled flooring nails through the tongues and into the subfloor, about 16 inches apart.
• Where there isn’t enough room to strike the nailer, turn it around and use splines to support the tongues (see Tip).
• And where there isn’t room to use splines, face-nail the strips to the subfloor using a brad nailer and 1½-inch nails.
• Once the floor is refinished, fill the nail holes with wood putty that matches the wood’s color.