How to fix a warped parquet floor?

Question

Less than one year ago my parquet floor was sanded and about 50% of it was replaced with new wood strips, sealed, and then buffed. Now, if my lovely cats happen to knock over their water and it spills on the floor, I end up with a few warped strips.

• It makes sense that water seeping into wood would warp it but shouldn't there be some resilience to this?

• Any suggestions on how to repair the warped strips?

I was thinking of something like mineral oil and a dumbbell.

Answer 1

You can try whatever to the board that is warped. If it works great, if it doesn't you are back to square one. Mineral oil plus dumbbell may work, but it is a factor of the amount of space that is there below the wood. I seriously doubt you are going to condense the water logged wood. So your objective would just be to have the wood flat on the surface.

Your other option if the wood is just bulging is to sand it down. Often for small areas this has a decent chance of working.

If you want your hardwood floor to be a bit more resistant to water than you need to hit it with a few coats of polyurethane. With cats this seems like a no brainer to me since if they piss it will soak into the floor (and possibly smell like cat pee forever).

Answer 2

Wait for it to dry....I have seen parquet that has been completely under water for several days, (and which was warped) to recover completely. Basically there is nothing you can do but wait....everything else would be worse. Recovery depends mostly on type of wood.

Answer 3

Here's the process I was told was to use:

• Spread some sawdust over the curvy board with filler, as if you were going to pile some dirt to even out the field.
• Use some sand paper to smoothen out the filler, which will stiffen
• Then coat it with a smooth finish

Alternatively, just remove a small sector of the board, turn it into a T formation into a bottom upside down half T at each end, sand, then coat and finito.