Patch punctures in parquet floors
How-to guru Jeanne Huber suggests options to help a reader mend a small dent.
Q A metal picture frame sitting on a bookcase fell about three feet and caused a small puncture wound in my parquet floor. The floor was installed in the 1960s and was refinished and stained seven years ago. I have some of the stain left over. How do I fix this hole?
A Sometimes damage to a floor is a bit like a bruise: The wood fibres get crushed, but they are still intact. In other cases, the damage is more brutal, when the fibres rip, creating the type of “puncture wound” damage that’s visible in the picture you sent.
When there is just a dent, with no frayed bits of wood fibre showing, it’s often possible to plump up the fibres so they spring back to their original position, erasing the dent.
The tool for this? An iron. Dampen a corner of a cloth (not the whole thing because you don’t want to drip all over the wood). Position the damp area of cloth over the dent and use the tip of the iron over the cloth to send a little burst of steam into the wood. You might need to do this a few times. The dent might not completely disappear, but it generally will become far less noticeable.
When a wood floor gets gouged enough to break the wood fibres, though, this approach won’t work. You need to fill the wound with wood filler — but which kind? You’ll find a confusing array staring at you at a paint store or in the paint section of a hardware store or home centre.
Some fillers are designed to be used to fill holes on projects before a final finish goes on. Patches dry hard, which means you can sand them level with the surrounding wood, apply stain (if needed) and then coat the whole surface with finish for an unblemished look. The main advantage of the solvent fillers is they dry faster, meaning the sanding step can begin sooner.
But if you are mending a wood floor that’s already been stained and finished, be aware that the colour won’t necessarily come out the same, whether you buy filler that has colour already mixed in or buy neutral-colour filler and tint it yourself with your leftover stain.
A whole different category of fillers is designed for use on projects that already have finish. Sold in jars or tins as putty or in crayon-like sticks or fat-lead pencils, these fillers never really dry. They have a waxy consistency, so you can push the material into a hole and rub off the excess with a soft cloth.
Putty or repair sticks are a better way to go on a floor, mostly because it’s easier to repair the one spot you’re targeting without damaging the surrounding wood and its finish.
But the larger the patch, the more noticeable it will be if you simply fill the hole with a coloured patch material, even if you really work at blending colours to get as close a colour match as possible.
Oak, which is almost certainly the type of wood in your parquet floor, has alternating bands of light- and dark-coloured wood, plus very thin, dark brown streaks running vertically in each board. These streaks are called rays.
Recreating these colour variations in a patch goes a long way toward making it invisible. Marker pens work great for this. Try to find a repair kit that includes a few blending sticks plus a few markers, which are also useful for touching up scratches on the wood floor.