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We just removed a wall between two bedrooms. Technically, it was 3 walls as there were closets on both sides of the wall. We had expected to have three 4" wide long gaps in our hardwood flooring that ran the length of the room, with about 2 feet between them. The original plan was to rip up the floor in between the gaps and lay down a cool, at least to us, 4' wide threshold instead of properly feathering in new hardwood. We expected the gaps to look something like

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Needless to say, when you knock a wall down in a 100 year old house, you do not always find what you expect. What we have is a single 4" wide gap that runs the length of the room. It starts out in the middle of where the wall was and runs for a 1/4 of the room, then moves 2' to the left and runs another 1/4 of the room, moves to the right 4' and runs 1/4 of the room, before moving back to the center. It looks something like

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Apart from doing it right and feathering in new hardwood floors, is there a way to make this look reasonable without cutting out the whole 4' wide section?

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    You are likely to obtain the best match by repairing the floor with vintage matching flooring. Check the other closets in the house and see if you can remove it and use it for the patch. This may require some careful cutting as the pieces may extend under the partitions.
    – mikes
    Commented Oct 3, 2017 at 22:37
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    Matching old flooring is really tough because today's materials are less dense than in years past. It can be done but usually resurfaceing the entire area is needed to help blend the repaired area vintage or new material both would require resurfacing to make it look good.
    – Ed Beal
    Commented Oct 4, 2017 at 13:36
  • @EdBeal that is why we were originally going to fill the 4 foot gap with something totally different. Now that it is a snaking 4 inch gap we are not sure what to do.
    – StrongBad
    Commented Oct 4, 2017 at 13:38

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Going side-to-side with a contrasting prefinished flooring can work. When I did this at my house, the flooring runs were perpendicular to the closet, and of course, they didn't lineup. I made a diagonal section 4ft wide section, across the whole room.

They make floor medallions that could disguise the transition. You would have to extend new flooring to either wall. enter image description here

Ceramic tile would be another option.

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