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I am seriously considering buying a very old apartment in an old Swiss farmhouse.

I want to know if the floorboards can be saved. They have gaps between them of about .8 cm to 2cm. Some of the wood looks like it has been infested with some sort of bugs. I have attached a picture of the shells of the bugs I have found.

My initial idea is to find the same type of wood and cut it to size to fill in the gaps and then sand it all down and stain it. They are also visible nails in the floorboards.

So my main question is can the floorboards be saved, do I need to get rid of them in order to get rid of the bugs?

enter image description here

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  • Have you determined how thick the wood is? Is the spots on the surface of the wood possibly holes in the wood from wood boring/eating insects? That alone may make it not worth the time to salvage the floor. It helps if the flooring is thick. Are the holes everywhere? Or only on the edges of each piece that could be cut out with your idea of adding strips? The last idea will have its own issues, if you choose to do so...
    – Jack
    Mar 21, 2021 at 17:02
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    they look like the bugs that infest cereal food products, such as flour, oats, bread, breakfast cereals, etc. , not wood boring bugs .... check the food storage areas in the house
    – jsotola
    Mar 21, 2021 at 17:12
  • The wood is 4cm thick, and the holes aren't everywhere mostly on one side of the room in one room.
    – dasPing
    Mar 24, 2021 at 19:20

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Since the floor is so thick, that has a lot going for it. Since it sounds like the holes are over a large area in a part of a room, that is not so good. Not knowing how bad the wood boring insects affected the wood, it will be hard to be definitive with an answer. The safest solution without knowing more about the floor, would be to replace the floor, since the one small section included in the picture does not represent how much damage the floor actually has.

If there was a way to determine the full extent of the damage and found it repairable, it could be done in 2 ways.

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The first picture is the simplest, but it will leave cracks where things can still fall through.

After all the cutting out of all the damaged material is done, I would have a pest control company look over the bug damage to see if they are still active, and let them act accordingly, then make the repairs.

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