Floorboard sizes

[AndersonC]

Can anyone help on this?

I'm in a terraced house circa 100 yrs old. A lot of the floorboards are shot to pieces due to re-wires etc. I desperately want to replace a lot of them but am being told that "new" T&G floorboards are smaller, i.e. not as wide and not as thick.

This would cause me a nightmare if I can only get smaller boards. Has anyone had any experience of trying to source "old sized" floorboards and was it easy?

Thanks

 

[WoodYouLike]

Would be helpful if you would give us the measurements of the boards you are looking for.

 

[JohnD]

And aren't your old boards square-edged?

 

[Scrit]

I desperately want to replace a lot of them but am being told that "new" T&G floorboards are smaller, i.e. not as wide and not as thick.

This would cause me a nightmare if I can only get smaller boards. Has anyone had any experience of trying to source "old sized" floorboards and was it easy?

There were no standard sizes in Victorian England as far as I can tell, so getting a match off the shelf might be difficult. Modern flooring is certainly thinner, but a local joiner's shop should be able to plane-up softwood to size for you, albeit probably not in the same species (for example our 1880s house has a mixture of pitch pine and parana pine). I machined my own boards from recycled pitch pine a few years back, but I didn't bother with tongue and groove as I knew that I'd have to lift the boards again in the future when I rewired. I am wary about machining this stuff for other people unless they're willing to indemnify me against cutter damage, as there is always the chance of hitting an included nail or the like and wrecking a sawblade or planer knife set doesn't make my day!

You could also try round the architectural/timber salvage yards in your area, or even demolition sites. Problem with 100 year old floorboards is that they tend to be brittle with age and have a certain amount of worm, so they break when you try to lift them, so T & G don't come up too often, but you might be lucky if you keep looking. And if you have to rip the
m to width it's easily enough done with a circular saw.

And aren't your old boards square-edged?

I've worked on houses built in the 1830s which had T & G boards, although the backs of the boards were rough sawn (our house is like that). Through feed 4-sided matching moulders (for T & G) were in use in the UK and USA well before the Great Exhibition (1851), although much more common from the 1860s onwards as firms like McDowall, Robinson and White's (in the UK) got into full swing

Scrit