How To Repair Your Water Damaged Floor

Not all DIY projects are glamorous. This one was rather gross, but nonetheless a very manageable DIY. A portion of water damaged floor in our kitchen has been a headache since we moved in, and this month it was finally time to fix it. In this post, I’ll show you how you can do the same if you need to repair a rotted, water damaged wood floor.

First up, a look at the damage:

The door on our ancient fridge has lost its stick, and if you’re not careful when you close it, it hangs open a tiny crack. This causes a little dribble of water out the front right corner of the fridge, which, over time, had seeped down and caused a nice section of rot in the adjacent floorboard. Yuck.

It’s been covered by stick-on linoleum tiles that were here when we moved in, so we didn’t know exactly how bad the hole was. It’s been one of those “out of sight, out of mind” things, but I knew it was time to address it before it got worse.

I know what you’re thinking—get a new fridge!—but that hasn’t been a priority in our budget just yet. Despite being a dinosaur, this fridge works perfectly fine other than the door that sometimes doesn’t stick. We’re going to make due with this one a little longer until we can invest in a few bigger kitchen upgrades.

Ok, so on to the fix.

A floor is made up of pieces of subfloor (essentially sheets of plywood) that are screwed to joists (the big beams that run side-by-side and hold up your house). Whatever kind of flooring you have—tile, laminate, carpet, etc.—is installed on top of this subfloor.

The great thing about homes up north versus homes in Florida where I grew up is that they have basements. This means you can get underneath the house and see exactly what’s going on when there’s an issue. I could see from our basement that the water damage hadn’t spread beyond the one floorboard directly under the leak, so all I needed to do was swap out that section of the floor.

I began by taking a crowbar and ripping out the soft, rotted section of the floorboard. I quickly realized this was going to result in an irregular shape that would be hard to patch rather than a clean rectangular cutout, so I switched to my Ryobi circular saw. I also purchased a wood-cutting blade so I’d have no problem making nice clean cuts.

I drew a rectangle around the rotted section and carefully took the saw to it. I set the saw depth to ¾”, the standard thickness of a piece of subfloor, made my cuts, and removed the rotten piece.

Next, I needed to cut a new piece of subfloor to fit into the hole I just cut out. For this, I picked up a $2 piece of scrap subfloor from Home Depot. (Pro tip: if you ever need pieces of wood or trim that are smaller than the standard size, ask for scraps! They sell them super cheap and will even cut them to the size you need.)

I made a few small trims to get the size of the new piece just right, then fit it into the hole and screwed it in place.

Note: This rectangle-cutout method worked because our kitchen has a double layer of subfloor, and the bottom layer was rot-free. So, it was easy for me to cut out a rectangle from the top layer of subfloor and just screw the new piece of wood to the bottom layer. If your subfloor has only one layer, you’ll need to cut out a wider piece so that the joists underneath are exposed at either side. You’ll attach the new piece of wood to these joists.

Unfortunately, our kitchen is the ugly duckling of the house flooring-wise, with the 1980’s era stick-on linoleum tiles. There were a few extra out in our shed, so I just pieced them right over the repaired spot. Eventually I will re-floor the kitchen to match the laminate in the rest of the house, or put down tile. I’ll get to it at some point, but I think I want to wait until we’ve saved up a bit and replace the stove and refrigerator at the same time.

All in all, this was a pretty simple project. I’m so glad that soggy section of rotten floor is gone!

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