A lot of the oldest houses in Trinity Park and Old North Durham have pine floors instead of the oak you find in the 1920s bungalows a few streets over. When the boards are reddish brown with tight, dark growth rings, that’s usually heart pine. Homeowners tend to find heart pine floors under carpet, under layers of old varnish, or worn gray in front of the kitchen sink, and the first thing they ask us is whether it’s worth keeping.
In most of the houses we see, it is. Heart pine is hard, handsome wood, and you can’t buy new heart pine at any price. Deciding what to do with it comes down to how much of the floor can be refinished as it is, how much needs patching, and whether any of it really has to be replaced.
Why These Two Neighborhoods Have So Much Of It
Both neighborhoods filled in around the same time. Trinity Park grew up beside Trinity College, which later became Duke, and much of it took off after Brodie Duke subdivided his land in 1901. Old North Durham was part of the same push. Duke sold building lots there that same year, a trolley line opened up the area to downtown, and businessmen built the big Colonial Revival houses along Mangum Street that people still call Mansion Row. Between the two neighborhoods you have Queen Anne cottages from the 1890s, Craftsman bungalows, and houses built well into the middle of the century.
Builders here used the wood they had, and in the Carolinas that meant longleaf pine. Heart pine is the heartwood at the center of old-growth longleaf trees, which took a century or more to reach full size. That old forest is almost entirely gone. By most counts only about 3 percent of the original longleaf forest is left, so the heart pine on the market today comes out of old buildings or from logs pulled out of rivers. When you’re deciding what to do with the floor in a Trinity Park house, that’s the context. Whatever you tear out can only be replaced with somebody else’s salvage.
Is Your Floor Really Heart Pine?
Not every old pine floor is heart pine, and it’s worth knowing which one you have before you decide anything. The heartwood is yellow when it’s first cut and darkens to a deep pinkish tan or warm reddish brown within weeks because of all the resin in it. Pine sapwood, from the outer part of the tree, stays yellow. Heart pine also has tight growth rings, often many to the inch, and the dark bands are hard and glassy.
Plenty of floors in these neighborhoods are a mix, with mostly heartwood and some boards that are mostly sapwood. That’s fine. It just changes what to expect. Sapwood boards are softer, so they dent and wear faster than the heart boards next to them, and they’ll stay lighter after we refinish.
Save: When Refinishing Is Enough
Most heart pine floors we look at can be sanded and refinished without replacing anything. Worn finish, gray traffic paths, scratches, old wax, and a dull orange color from aging varnish all come off with sanding. If all you have is a few light scratches and the finish is still intact, you may not need a full sand at all, and our post on getting scratches out of hardwood floors covers the lighter options.
What decides whether a full refinish is possible is how much wood is left above the tongue. Every sanding takes some off. A floor that’s more than a hundred years old may have been sanded several times already, and we explain how we measure that in our post on whether to refinish or replace hardwood. We check it by pulling a floor register or looking at a board edge at a threshold, so we’re not guessing.
A few other things we look at before calling a floor a refinish job:
- Nail heads. Some old pine floors were nailed through the face of the board instead of through the tongue. Those nails have to be set below the surface before sanding, or they’ll tear up the sandpaper and leave shiny spots.
- Gaps between boards. Old floors open up in the winter and close in the summer. Some of that is normal and goes away on its own. Our post on how humidity affects hardwood floors explains the seasonal cycle. Gaps that stay open year-round are a different matter, and we deal with those as part of the patching.
- Soft spots and squeaks. Those point to a problem underneath. Our post on what we find under older Durham floors covers the subfloor and joist issues that show up in these houses.
Why Heart Pine Sands Differently Than Oak
Heart pine is full of resin, even a century after the tree was cut, and that resin melts and loads up sandpaper fast. On heart pine, a sheet of sandpaper can load up after 20 or 30 square feet, so we go through a lot more paper than on an oak floor the same size. The edger clogs even faster, which is why we often hand-scrape the edges instead.
The grain causes the other problem. Each growth ring has a soft band and a hard band. If the sander lingers or the paper is dull, it cuts the soft bands deeper than the hard ones and leaves a rippled surface you can feel with your hand and see once the finish goes on. Getting heart pine flat takes sharp paper, steady passes, and more of them than oak needs. That’s why we said in our post on what it costs to refinish hardwood in Durham that heart pine costs more to sand right.
Before any finish goes down, the resin that the sanding brought to the surface has to be cleaned off with a solvent that’s compatible with the finish. If it isn’t, the finish can have trouble sticking or curing. This step gets skipped more than it should, and it’s one of the ways a refinished heart pine floor ends up with finish problems later.
Stain Or Natural? Picking A Finish For Heart Pine
We usually talk people out of staining heart pine. The resin makes it take stain unevenly, and the natural color is the reason most people want to keep the floor in the first place. If you want it darker, we’ll do sample boards in an out-of-the-way spot first so you see the real result before we commit a whole room.
The finish itself changes the color more than people expect. An oil-based polyurethane brings out the amber and red in heart pine and deepens over time. A water-based finish keeps the wood lighter and closer to how it looks freshly sanded. Neither one is wrong. It depends on whether you want the floor to look like it did in 1910 or more like the day the boards were cut. Keep in mind that the freshly sanded surface is lighter than the color it will settle into. Heart pine darkens again over the following weeks and months, whichever finish you pick.
Patch: Fixing Damaged Boards Without Losing The Floor
Most of the heart pine floors we restore need some patching. The usual spots:
- Black pet stains, which soak deep into pine and almost never sand out.
- Water damage near the kitchen sink, the bathroom door, or where an old refrigerator sat.
- Holes left where an old floor furnace or heat register was taken out.
- Gaps where a wall or chimney hearth used to be.
- Boards that were cut for plumbing and never put back right.
The fix is to cut out the damaged boards and weave in replacements, staggering the ends so there’s no straight seam. For a heart pine floor, the replacement has to be reclaimed heart pine, matched for width, thickness, and how tight the growth rings are. Our post on matching new hardwood to old floors goes through how we source and weave in boards for older houses. Reclaimed heart pine costs more than new oak and can take a while to find.
Sometimes the best match is already in your house. We can pull boards from a closet or from under the kitchen cabinets, use them for the patch in the main room, and put the new material in the closet where nobody will see it. Boards from the same floor match better than anything we can buy.
Patched boards won’t look perfect on day one. The fresh surface of a reclaimed board starts out lighter than the old floor around it and darkens over the next few weeks. Once the whole room is sanded and finished together, most patches get hard to spot within a season.
If the damaged boards show termite channels or soft, crumbly wood underneath, stop and deal with the cause first. Our post on rotted subfloors and termite damage walks through who to call.
Replace: When It’s The Honest Answer
Replacing heart pine is the last option, but sometimes it’s the right one. That’s usually when:
- The floor has been sanded so many times that the tongues show or the nails are near the surface.
- Rot or termites have damaged most of a room, not just a few boards.
- A large section is already gone, and finding enough reclaimed heart pine to match would cost more than the room is worth to you.
Even then, you have choices. We can save the good boards from the damaged room to patch the rest of the house, and put reclaimed heart pine or a different species in the room being replaced. New oak won’t look like heart pine, and we’ll tell you that up front. If you want the rooms to read as one floor, reclaimed heart pine is the only real match, since there’s no engineered product with the same width and grain.
Painted Borders, Old Finishes, And Lead
Older floors in these neighborhoods often have painted borders around where a rug used to sit, paint spatter along the walls, or several layers of old shellac and varnish. In any house built before 1978, paint can contain lead, and sanding it puts lead dust into the air and into the house.
The EPA’s Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule requires anyone paid to do work that disturbs paint in a pre-1978 home to be certified in lead-safe work practices. Nearly every house in these two neighborhoods was built before then. If a floor has painted borders or heavy paint spatter, ask whoever you hire about their certification and how they’ll test and contain the dust before any sanding starts. Our post on dustless sanding explains how dust containment works during a refinish.
What It Costs
Refinishing heart pine falls at the higher end of normal refinishing prices because the sanding takes longer and uses a lot more paper. The Durham cost guide linked above has the per-square-foot ranges. Patching is priced by the number of boards and how hard the reclaimed material is to find, and it goes on the written quote line by line before we start. If we have to hunt for reclaimed boards, we tell you that up front so the schedule doesn’t catch you off guard.
Replacing a room with reclaimed heart pine costs more than replacing it with new oak. Saving and patching the original floor almost always costs less than either one.
Getting Your Heart Pine Floors Looked At
We’re a family-owned flooring company in Durham, and old floors in these neighborhoods are some of our favorite jobs. On a free in-home estimate I’ll check what species you have, how much wood is left, and which boards need patching, and you’ll get a written, fixed quote by email, usually within a day or two. If you want to see how we install and refinish, our page on hardwood floor installation and refinishing covers it.
Vilchis Hardwood Floors
237 Obie Dr, Durham, NC 27713
(919) 794-1116
[email protected]
Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Serving Durham, Raleigh, Cary, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, Apex, Morrisville, Garner, and Wake Forest.
Request a free in-home estimate
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Heart Pine Worth Saving?
Almost always. It’s hard, strong wood from trees that took a century or more to grow, and nobody is cutting new heart pine. Anything you replace it with is either a different species or reclaimed wood that costs more than refinishing what you already have.
How Many Times Can A Heart Pine Floor Be Refinished?
It depends on how much wood is left above the tongue, and on a floor this old that varies a lot from house to house. Some have plenty left for another refinish or two. Some have been sanded so often that there’s only one careful sanding left. We measure it before we quote.
Can You Stain Heart Pine Darker?
You can, but it often takes stain unevenly because of the resin. We’ll always do test samples first. Most people end up liking the natural color under an oil-based finish better than any stain.
Will Patched Boards Match The Rest Of The Floor?
Close, if the patch uses reclaimed heart pine with similar growth rings, or boards borrowed from a closet. The new pieces start out a little lighter and darken over the next few weeks.
How Do I Take Care Of Heart Pine After It’s Refinished?
The same way you’d care for any finished hardwood. Put felt pads under the furniture and mats at the doors, and don’t wet-mop it. Our daily, weekly, and seasonal hardwood care routine has the details.
Mario Vilchis runs Vilchis Hardwood Floors out of 237 Obie Dr in Durham. He’s been installing and refinishing wood floors in the Triangle since 2009 and shows up to every estimate himself. Reach the shop at (919) 794-1116.
