How to match new floor boards to the existing finish

Q: We hired a local handyman to help renovate a bathroom and rework two entry-area closets into a unified closet with bi-fold doors. This meant replacing some of the wide-plank pine floorboards in our 1980s beach house. But the finish on the new floorboards isn’t right, and it’s driving me crazy. Short of hiring a professional to sand and refinish the entire floor of the open-space living room, dining room, kitchen and hallway, is there a way to make the new boards look better?

A: Patching a wood floor and making it match is always tricky. But from the pictures you sent, it looks like your handyman didn’t try very hard. He seems to have sanded the new boards to get them level, which was smart, but didn’t take care to sand just those boards. It’s not clear from the pictures whether the whitish haze on the new boards and the ends of the older ones come from scuff marks from sanding with a rough grit, or whether the wood was topped with a finish in an inappropriate color.

Either way, to get everything to match, the best solution is to refinish the entire floor. But that’s a hassle, and it’s expensive. You should be able to significantly improve the way the floor looks, though, without resorting to that. Get a few pieces of pine to use as test pieces. Prepare them by sanding in the direction of the wood grain with 100-grit sandpaper. That, not anything finer, is the final sanding grit recommended for wood floors.

How to clean and care for hardwood floors

The old floorboards have a rich amber color. That typically comes from having an initial coat of oil finish, which might have been topped by additional, similar coats or with a water-based varnish. For your first test piece, brush some oil-based varnish or oil-based polyurethane onto one board, if you happen to have a can of either finish on hand. If you need to buy finish, you might want to get boiled linseed oil instead. It will make pine change colors in a similar way but without exposing you to the same level of solvents. (Boiled linseed oil is $17.99 a quart at Ace Hardware.) With a clean cloth, rub some of the oil into one of your test pieces. Let it soak in for a few minutes, then wipe away the excess. Be careful not to leave the rags in a pile; linseed oil cures by combining with oxygen in the air, and this reaction releases enough heat to make wadded-up rags spontaneously burst into flame. Hang rags individually to dry.

Linseed oil darkens wood slightly over time, so wait about a week to evaluate the color match. One of the benefits of trying to make new and old wood match by using oil or oil finish alone is that it preserves the normal color pattern. Pine, like many other softwoods, has contrasting bands of light-colored wood that grew in springtime and alternating dark-colored bands that grew in winter. The spring wood is much softer and spongier than the winter wood, so if you apply stain, the light-colored wood absorbs more pigment than the denser, darker wood. Bands of wood that were lighter often become even darker than the winter wood, a color shift that can look almost ghoulish if you see darkly stained and naturally aged pine side by side.

To avoid that possibility, you might want to go ahead with linseed oil (or an oil finish) as the solution if the colors of the old wood and the sample look fairly uniform, even if the match isn’t perfect. But avoid the ugly sanding marks left by your handyman by refinishing entire boards: all of the new pieces plus the old floorboards that the handyman marred. Use wide painter’s tape to mask off surrounding boards. Then sand the boards that you didn’t mask off. You can use a random-orbit sander where you need to refinish several boards that are side by side, but you’ll need to hand-sand in the direction of the wood grain along edges next to the painters tape and where a lone board is isolated between strips of tape. To remove the finish on the older boards, you will probably need to start with a coarser grit, perhaps 40 or 60. Then work up to 80 and finally 100.

If oil alone doesn’t get the new wood to match the older wood, staining the new wood is your only option, short of refinishing the entire floor. A couple of tips can help create a fairly uniform, natural looking result. Before you apply stain, brush on a wood conditioner, which will fill pores in the wood so the surface absorbs stain more evenly. If you use a water-based stain, be sure to get a water-based wood conditioner, such as Minwax water-based pre-stain wood conditioner ($21.99 a quart at Ace). For the stain, consider using SamaN wood stain, a water-based product that’s easy to apply and eliminates the overlap marks that sometimes show with other stains ($18.49 for 12 ounces on Amazon). Made by a company in Canada, the stains come in numerous wood colors, which you can mix together to create custom colors or dilute with water to create a color wash. The manufacturer says it’s not necessary to apply a wood conditioner first. But using one will make the stain stretch farther and go on more evenly, said Carol Fiedler Kawaguchi, owner of C-Saw, a furniture restoration company on Bainbridge Island, Wash., who often uses these stains to make repaired wood blend in with older wood.

Water-based conditioner and the SamaN stains both dry quickly — often in less than 15 minutes. Once the surface is the color you want and dry, top that with several coats of a clear acrylic finish. Ideally, you want to match the gloss level on the older boards. Years of wear have probably changed the way the finish looks, so satin is probably a good choice.

One thing you might consider: If you get the color of the new boards to match fairly well, you could hire a pro to screen — or lightly sand — the whole floor and then apply a coat or two of new finish. It’s quicker and less costly than a full refinishing, but it gives the whole floor a uniform top coat and makes the existing finish last longer.

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