save wood floor on our first flip?

Question

I am a new investor and working on my first flip. 1st day of demo and we found old wood floors throughout 80% of the house. living room, dining room and hallway each have about a 3' x 3' cut out of the wood that was replaced with sub flooring. We did budget for all new flooring in the house. My question is do I tear up the old wood floor and try to salvage and sell?, Do I just lay new flooring over everything and move on or do I try to keep what I can of the old wood floors even though they may not match? My inclination is just to go over all the old flooring but I don't want to make a rookie mistake! What do I do??

Marc Winter · Answer

You found a little gold mine there my friend.  Here's what we have done successfully:  take a bedroom (or another smaller room) as a sacrifice parts room.  Rip up the wood floor from that room and patch the rest of the wooden floors with that.

When done properly (and most likely all the wood was originally installed from the same batch and at same time), you will have magnificent wooden floors.

Don't skimp on a refinisher--it will make all the difference!

Dana Novakovich · Answer

excellent ideas. Thank you. The real gold mine is this bigger pockets!!!

Jeff Berg · Answer

Hi Dana,

I agree with Marc Winter, you could use the master bedroom as a matching hardwood source, then carpet the sacrificial floor.

OR, since you'll only have about 27 square feet of total replacement (three 3'x3' sections), you could use the center of the living room for the dining and hall replacement, refinish the remaining LR hardwood, and lay a nice carpet just over the center with about two or three feet (depending on the size of the room) of exposed hardwood at the walls. Then, you can still have a finished matching wood floor in the bedroom.

Either way, not at all necessary to install a new wood floor on top of the existing or pull it all up.