Hardwood Floor Inlays and Borders in Ann Arbor

A border is a band of contrasting wood around the field of a room. A feature strip is a single narrow line of it, set a few inches in from the border or on its own. Walnut around white oak is a common pairing; the Journal of Light Construction describes bird's-eye maple strips inside a cherry border.

Wood Floor Business suggests starting with a simple feature strip for anyone new to border work, which tells you something about how fussy the rest is. The usual method, described by both Wood Floor Business and the Journal of Light Construction: install the field first with its ends left long, keep nails out of the border zone, snap the border lines, cut the field edges clean with a track saw, then rout a groove so every border piece locks in by tongue and groove or slip tongue. Corners are mitered at 45 degrees or stepped. The border gets glued to the subfloor as well as nailed.

Layout starts from the room's center, not the walls, since walls are rarely straight. That centerline method is the same one used for pattern floors and is explained on herringbone floor installation.

Medallions are made to order: small pieces of hardwood cut precisely and mounted on a plywood backing, according to This Old House. The better ones are at least 5/16 inch thick so they can be sanded more than once. They're made to match your floor's thickness, so the maker usually asks for a sample, cut out from the spot where the medallion will go.

Installation follows the router template that comes with the medallion. The contractor marks the outline, checks it with a magnetic nail finder and shifts it off any flooring nails, then routes down to the subfloor in several shallow passes. The medallion is bedded in flooring adhesive and tapped flush. This Old House warns that a routed cutout can change shape slightly if it sits for more than a few hours, so routing and setting happen in one go.

Entries and hearths are where an inlay earns its keep, because they're the two places a room has a natural frame. In an entry hall, a medallion or a border rectangle marks the threshold. The Journal of Light Construction describes a 4-foot compass rose in an entry hall that came with its own routing template and bit; the crew kept nails out of the whole inlay area during the field install.

At a fireplace, the border wraps the hearth. Wood Floor Business shows the field following the shape of the hearth, grooved and fitted with slip tongue just like the rest of the border, with the inside corners cleaned with a chisel. Our view: a hearth surround is the best first inlay for most houses. It's one wall, it frames something that's already there, and it doesn't ask the room to have perfectly square corners.

Older houses sometimes still have their original borders: a Greek key, a band of walnut or mahogany strips, or a simple contrasting stripe near the walls. When pieces are missing or burned, the repair is new strips milled to the old ones' width and thickness in the same species, fitted into the pattern and sanded flush.

Sanding is the risky part. Border strips run at right angles to each other at every turn of the pattern, so a drum sander crosses the grain somewhere. A good contractor will slow down at the border with the edger and hand tools and check for cross-grain scratches before any finish goes on. Thin, much-sanded borders need the same check for remaining wood as the rest of an old floor; that's on hardwood floor restoration.