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Flooring for hallway with old wood floor

14 years ago

We pulled up the carpet in our hallway, and found 100-year-old yellow pine strip hardwood with a thick coating of some adhesive (from another floor) over it. We were able to pull up some of the adhesive, but it's clear that the floor underneath is badly damaged, with splintered boards and big pieces missing. I did get some estimates to restore, but they're expensive and I'm worried about removing the adhesive.

So, I had someone come in to give me an estimate on putting something *over* the floor. He said that they could go over it with a 3/8" engineered hardwood. He wanted to use a thin product so that the floors wouldn't be noticeably higher than those in the rooms off the hall.

A few questions -

1. Is 3/8" enough to last for a long time?

2. We have all sorts of mouldings (base moldings and casings for the doors) that touch this floor. This guy said that they would butt the floor up against the base mouldings and cut it to fit around the fluted casings. We like this, as we don't want to take the chance of ruining the old mouldings by removing and re-attaching them, but will it look all right?

3. Will they need to put a base under the floor, something like 1/4" luan?

4. Would we be better off just getting them to remove the whole thing and put in solid 3/4" hardwood? Do you think that would be way more expensive? (I'd be willing to try doing it, but am not sure I can.)

Thanks for your help!

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