Repairing dents in a hardwood floor with an iron

Here I'm doing a small repair on two dents in a white oak floor. First I use an iron to "pop" the dents out, then sand and refinish the damaged boards. I use a light stain with clear waterborne finish to fake the look of Swedish without stinking up the customer's home
Wood - No. 1 White Oak 2-1/4" T&G
Stain - Bona Dri-fast Golden Oak
Finish - Bona Traffic clear
Music - United States Marine Band - Girimeo Polka

[@joesnowmobiles]

Thanks for the video, very nice job, just watched it with a friend who had a large divot in their floor, it gave them hope!

[@ScottBelleriWorkshop]

Now that's a thorough job!

[@GrahamAtDesk]

That's absolutely superb, thanks for sharing.

[@hussaintahera]

Wow, thats a hell lot of effort to fix small dents 😀

[@nforester]

Super cool! Amazing knowledge of wood and great skills. My respect 👍

[@wjaiv]

The ratio of equipment, time, effort, etc. to actual problem here is absurd. I guess this makes sense if you already have all this stuff, but still...good lord.

[@pseudoplexaura]

:)

[@xamphoa]

My exact thinking. lol

[@wjaiv]

C. A. G. Is this literally the only way to fix a chip? I had a chip in my hardwood floor. Filled it with wood filler, stained it, then used brown and black crayons to get it really similar to the floor, and added polyurethane. It’s not perfect like in this video, but you would never notice it unless I pointed to it or if you were looking really closely.

[@wjaiv]

C. A. G. I’m good, thanks. Not sure why you’re being an asshole.

[@mstunameow]

@@c.a.g.3130 WTAF are you talking about. Wood filler isn't peanut butter. It's made for this. There literally dozens of choices of wood filler for this job, and you can easily find a color matched product. You can find plenty of videos on how to do hard wood spot repair like wjaiv is asking about, and they are actually videos by professionals unlike this one. No offense to the poster of this video, but they clearly are not - but they did an impressive job and used an interesting method. They just thought this was the best approach for their specific dents.

[@Jack-gz6mi]

Excellent job

[@jakefriesenjake]

On a prized guitar wood sure.... But on a wood floor, where little Johnny is just going to pound in a fresh dent, later on that night?.... Fricken great job, and great video. Thanks

[@kanddwright]

Hey, I resent both the implication that I'll pound in a fresh dent and the "little" part.

[@pseudoplexaura]

Loving the music!

[@WENCHY101]

You make it look so easy. I'd fk up my floor! 😂

[@billpholde4816]

Music was entertaining.

[@sbmang4927]

That looks like a lot of work. Can i just use a wood filler instead?

[@MADDMOODY516]

Did you find out?

[@KGrant-ty3oy]

Wow! Great instructions. Quick question- what type of vapor barrier was that? Thank you!!

[@robertbirdsell5838]

Aquabar B

[@cubul32]

A second Q: can you spot repair for something where you have the same stain and varnish? I'm concerned about blending the edges of the varnish. Can you buff varnish out like on a car to blend it? Maybe sand with high grit like 1000, 1500, 2000, 3000 then buff? Ever tried it, would it work?

[@robertbirdsell5838]

In my experience buffing finish from repairs doesn't work too well to blend it in. Usually the surrounding finish is more worn and dull, so buffing just makes the repair stand out more.

[@mickchaganis6607]

Thanks, we moved a fridge out of a kitchen, foot came off and grooved customers oak floor.

[@cubul32]

Robert, can we use something else instead of the vapor barrier? Would anything that blocks the heat and vapor be good there? I would expect it so. Not sure I can find the vapor barrier paper without buying an entire roll.

[@robertbirdsell5838]

I don't know how much work the vapor barrier did, I was just worried about over steaming the rest of the floor, don't really know what else would work, or if it was necessary.

[@violettavalery8759]

1. The music is great. 2. Gives me goose pimples to see a man ironing.

[@robertbirdsell5838]

1. Thank you. 2. You're welcome!

[@cozmicmojo2181]

I saw another video do this without stripping the finish off. Will that work?

[@robertbirdsell5838]

Depends on the finish. This was Swedish, so it's like a thin layer of plastic, the water can't really permeate it.

[@mstunameow]

Yes. You can find videos of how to do this with wood filler. You can get wood filler that takes stain just like wood. It really depends on what kind of wood floor you have, and what kind of dents you have. My wood floor has the occasional knot or irregularity. Smaller dents that have a "natural" looking shape compared to the wood grain are *easy* to fix with wood filler or to spot fix in general. But if you have larger, jagged/irregular shaped dents, it's a much bigger challenge

[@Luka1180]

@@robertbirdsell5838 What if it's oil?

[@cryinginnihongo]

Does the iron thing work with deeper dents?

[@chromedeluxe7013]

Great video Robert. My main concern is how the new finish will look next to the old finish. Any tricks you can recommend? As I would rather not have to redo my entire floor.

[@robertbirdsell5838]

Not really. That's starting to get into art restoration techniques. The low cost of refinishing already makes this type of work not economically viable, so there's basically no effort in the industry to cater to it. Best you could try is scuffing up the new finish with some steel wool or something to try to dull it to match the surrounding, but I've never managed to get that to work well.

[@jeremyb7659]

It will Matte down and blend in over time

[@mstunameow]

Do not use steel wool "or something" to "scuff up" your floor finish. I'm confused why the poster thinks the problem is that the rest of your finish is scuffed. I assume you want the stain and the shininess to match. That's the problem with taking this approach. You will have to have a lot of experience to properly match it, if you don't still have more of it on hand. It's quite a lot of effort for a result that arguably will be no better, and perhaps far more noticeable than a proper wood filler spot treatment. I'm suspicious that several steps of this restoration didn't go as planned so it snowballed into sanding, scraping, restaining and refinishing entire boards. You can find many, many videos that take a simpler approach with phenomenal results.

[@shluva2012]

Amazing. What is the name of the tool that you used to scrape off the finish?

[@robertbirdsell5838]

It's just called a scraper. Sometimes they're sold as paint scrapers.

[@shluva2012]

Robert Birdsell Thank you!!

[@Haymaker-rd6zp]

What did you charge for that job?

[@charlesgillingham61]

Was this for a client? Very awesome professional work, great job.

[@robertbirdsell5838]

Thanks, yeah this was for a client, I wanted to try ironing out the dents to see if it would work. The backup plan was to replace the boards if the dents wouldn't pop out, but that isn't always an option if the material is more exotic.

[@charlesgillingham61]

Yea good thing you could experiment with some good ole red.

[@wiltonwoodydotcom4757]

@@robertbirdsell5838 if you don't mind, ballpark, what do you charge for something like that?

[@robertbirdsell5838]

@@wiltonwoodydotcom4757 This one was heavily discounted because it was more of an experiment, but just based on the time on site (initial work, then waiting for stain and finish to dry for multiple coats) it would be around $300. Not very practical in most cases to be honest.

[@wiltonwoodydotcom4757]

@@robertbirdsell5838 cool appreciate the honesty, I'm a carpenter myself and as I'm sure you're aware, pricing out stuff is the worst part of the job, and generally comes down to calculated gambling.... However it's nice to have comparative numbers every now and again, that figure is inline with what I would have guessed. I've started to work out an AI machine learning cost estimating program, not to replace human estimating but to help guide and speed up the process.

[@333dav3eee]

Next time just be more careful installing the dish washer! Lol

[@ashperson2134]

Great now my mom won't find out, knifes kill. Wood that is

[@virginawherle3136]

Please fix my floor! This all looks too hard 😩

[@cubul32]

Thanks Robert. People commenting here about how labor intensive or how much you scraped off are clearly idiots that don't fix anything and have no idea what it takes to do Home Improvement. Your clip is spot on - I was gonna look for Bona too after a contractor buddy recommended it. Are you in Canada, just curious.

[@MsCookieday]

how about just using wood filler?

[@mstunameow]

@@c.a.g.3130 LOL another brilliant know-it-all comment. Wood filler would stand out for dents of the size shown in this video unless you use advanced methods. If you're filling a dent that isn't in an area with a lot of "grain" or color variation, it will work perfectly. There are dozens of kinds of wood filler and there methods to make it look grainy. This CAG fella who thinks he is pro is very definitely not

[@teeduck]

Didn't work for me

[@lincolnlawyer9704]

No way would this be worth doing for two scratch. Call it antiquing the floor and behave a beer.

[@lvck1lvck139]

Are you crazy?!?! Easier to replace whole floor! Thanks for the "tip".

[@robertbirdsell5838]

This cost almost nothing, and took about 2 hours, most of which was waiting for finish to dry. I'm not sure how you think it would be easier to replace anything.

[@challengerbrant]

smartest response of all. once realized. panic sets in to all!

[@Jack-gz6mi]

lvck1 lvck1 how’d you work that one out?! I’ve just layed 20m2 of oak engineered flooring. I can tell you this method is 100x quicker and 100x cheaper then replacing the whole floor!

[@yajatyadav3348]

how much did it cost to fix the two dents.

[@wellcraft2136]

@@Jack-gz6mi This method generally will not work on engineered flooring. The top laminate surface is too thin.

[@akastonefaceddog]

WTF is with the music, ffs.

[@patriciabershak3821]

The background music is super annoying

[@indirar4759]

Wtf? Scrape up so much of wood? Are yOu kidding me? No thanks!

[@cubul32]

If you don't you won't be able to get a uniform look on the wood tile. Understand the concept before bashing.